Wishes
Tell me what you wish for and the poem will tell me who you are.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about wishes: longing, imagery and craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
A wish is a self-portrait in disguise. Whatever a speaker asks of the candle, the star or the well, the asking exposes exactly what their life is missing, and that gap between the life lived and the life wanted is where wish poems operate. The machinery, coins, wishbones, birthday breath, eyelashes, is charming, but the subject underneath is desire with the volume turned up and the odds turned down.
The theme has a built-in dramatic engine: wishes are dangerous. Folklore is unanimous that granted wishes arrive with a twist, that the exact words matter, that you should be careful. A wish poem can therefore run on hope, on dread, or on the fine print between them, and the strongest ones know which of the three they are running on.
Why poets return to it
Poets write wishes because a wish is the purest available sample of a person's inner life, more honest than a plan and braver than a prayer. The theme suits every register from a child's birthday to a refugee's paperwork. Because judges reading for theme and emotion respond to specificity, a wish poem entered in Writory's monthly contest tends to fare better when it wishes for one precise, surprising thing rather than for happiness in general.
Where it comes from
Folk tradition did the early work: the counting rhymes, the first star of evening, the three wishes that undo their wisher in tales from every continent. Literary poets refined the material. Yeats, in He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, offers the sky itself, admits he is poor, and lays his dreams under the beloved's feet, the wish poem as total vulnerability.
Langston Hughes built some of the twentieth century's most necessary poems on deferred dreams, wishes postponed by injustice until they sag, harden or threaten to explode. His work is the standing proof that a wish poem can be political dynamite as well as private tenderness.
The elements that carry it
- The apparatus of wishing: candles, coins, wells, wishbones, dandelion clocks, shooting stars, each with its own tone.
- Breath, the physical act behind candles and dandelions, linking wishing to the body and to speech itself.
- Thresholds of luck: new years, birthdays, eclipses, first stars, the calendar's official windows for wanting.
- The unspoken rule of secrecy, since a wish told aloud is void, a gift for poems about what cannot be said.
- Small change: the pocket economics of hope, what people will pay a fountain for.
Techniques that work
- Make the wish specific and slightly wrong-footing: not happiness but one more argument with a late father, not wealth but the bus arriving before the rain.
- Use the folklore of exact wording: a poem can turn on the gap between what was wished and what was meant.
- Write the moment before the wish, the held breath over the candles, and let the reader never learn what was asked.
- Structure a poem as three wishes and let the third break the pattern the first two established.
- Try the granted wish: the poem that begins after the star delivers, and counts the unexpected cost.
Mistakes to avoid
- Wishing for abstractions: peace, happiness, love. Fix: interrogate the abstraction until it yields one concrete, personal image.
- Ignoring the odds. A wish poem with no awareness that wishes mostly fail loses the tension that makes wishing poignant.
- Borrowed apparatus with no belief behind it: a well and a coin do nothing unless the speaker's need is real.
- Sweetness without shadow. The tradition insists wishes have teeth; a poem that forgets the danger reads like a card, not a spell.
An exercise
Write your last five birthday wishes as honestly as you can remember or reconstruct them. Choose the one that most embarrasses you and write a poem in which that wish is finally spoken aloud to the person it concerns.
A challenge
Write a poem of exactly three wishes for someone other than yourself, a stranger you saw once, an enemy, a past self, making each wish more specific and difficult than the last.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which a coin at the bottom of a fountain speaks, holding the wish it was thrown with and reporting, years later, on whether it came true.
Before you submit
- The central wish is specific enough to belong to one person only.
- The poem acknowledges the odds, the cost or the twist somewhere.
- The wishing apparatus, if used, is grounded in real belief or real doubt.
- At least one image involves the body: breath, closed eyes, crossed fingers.
- The ending resists neat granting; it lands on longing, consequence or silence.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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