Superstitions
Salt over the shoulder, one magpie saluted: the folk poetry your family already practises.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about superstitions: folk ritual, imagery and craft techniques, common mistakes, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this Writory guide.
What this theme is
Superstitions are folk poems that people live instead of read. A spilled salt cellar answered with a pinch over the shoulder, a single magpie greeted aloud, a ladder given a wide berth: each is a tiny ritual drama with imagery, repetition and stakes, performed daily by people who would never call themselves poets. Writing this theme means noticing that your grandmother's rules were metaphors with consequences, and treating them with the seriousness of any inherited text.
Under the charm lies the real subject: the human attempt to negotiate with chance. Every superstition is a small treaty signed with an unpredictable world, and every treaty reveals a fear, of loss, of the evil eye, of saying the good thing aloud and jinxing it. The poem's work is to honour the ritual while quietly opening the fear inside it.
Why poets return to it
Poets are drawn to superstition because it is where the ordinary and the uncanny share a kitchen. The theme offers ready-made structure, rules, numbers, forbidden acts, and deep personal material, since most superstitions arrive through family and carry the accent of the person who taught them. Writing them down is often an act of preservation: the ritual dies with its last practitioner unless a poem catches it.
Where it comes from
Robert Herrick filled his 1648 collection Hesperides with charms and ceremonies, spells against the evil eye and instructions for keeping households lucky, folk practice recorded as lyric. The magpie counting rhyme, one for sorrow, two for joy, has been chanted in Britain and Ireland for centuries and remains one of the most quoted folk poems in the language.
W. B. Yeats gathered Irish fairy lore and let it soak into his early poems, treating peasant belief as a national treasury rather than an embarrassment, and Seamus Heaney later wrote the rituals of rural Derry, the cures, the wells, the things not said, with an archaeologist's care. The theme has always been respectable; it simply pretends not to be.
The elements that carry it
- Household objects with rules attached: mirrors, salt, shoes on tables, umbrellas indoors, knives given as gifts.
- Counting and numbers, magpies, thirteen, third time lucky, the arithmetic of fate.
- Gestures of protection: touched wood, crossed fingers, a coin in a new purse, iron over a door.
- Animals as omens, black cats, single crows, a bird indoors, messengers whose message depends on the region.
- The voice of instruction, never, always, or else, the grammar of inherited warning.
Techniques that work
- Write the person, not just the practice: the aunt who saluted magpies is the poem, her ritual is the door into her.
- Use the imperative mood, the theme's native grammar, and let a poem of instructions slowly reveal the fear behind them.
- Set belief and doubt in the same stanza: a speaker who half-believes is more interesting than a believer or a scoffer.
- Build a poem on the structure of a ritual, step by step, so the form itself feels like a charm being performed.
- Record precise regional or family variants; the superstition nobody else knows is worth ten everyone does.
Mistakes to avoid
- Cataloguing superstitions like a trivia page. Fix: choose one, and one person who practised it, and go deep.
- Mocking the believers. Condescension kills the theme; the strongest poems respect the fear the ritual manages.
- Generic props, black cat, broken mirror, with no lived detail. Anchor the ritual in a specific kitchen, decade and voice.
- Explaining the psychology. Name the anxiety behind the charm and the poem deflates; enact it instead.
An exercise
List every superstition practised in your childhood home, however small, including the ones nobody named aloud. Choose the one most specific to your family and write a poem teaching it to a stranger, exactly as it was taught to you.
A challenge
Write a charm poem of your own invention, a spell against something modern, lost signal, missed trains, bad news at 3 a.m., using the traditional grammar of never, always and or else.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the first time you deliberately broke a superstition you were raised with, walking under the ladder, saying the forbidden word, and what you kept expecting to happen for the rest of the day.
Before you submit
- The poem centres one ritual and one practitioner, not a catalogue.
- Specific household detail places the superstition in a real time and home.
- The fear or hope the ritual manages is felt but never clinically explained.
- Instructional grammar, if used, escalates or turns somewhere in the poem.
- The tone respects the believers, whatever the speaker has decided.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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