short poems about beauty
Beauty can be a blessing or a curse or a thrill or a cudgel. These short poems use beauty as a metaphor, mock rigid standards of beauty, and more. We hope you enjoy them.
starve
Hey Lady Large, they said,
kindly take up less space,
starve away cell by cell
‘til you know your place.
So she modified her diet,
lived on hunger, hope and air,
reduced herself bit by bit
‘til there was no one there.
monsters
Her beauty is
her sustenance.
Like a dark
magnet, it
draws monsters
from their dens.
They follow
her home and
scratch at her door
until she brings
them inside and
kills/
cleans/
eats them.
coda
the cares of the day
are put away.
light fades.
stars open their
brilliant eyes
and an old woman
looks up from
her porch and smiles.
the end is as beautiful
as the beginning.
creeping beauty
He oozed with charm,
or so he thought,
he did no harm,
or so he said,
don’t be alarmed,
he murmured,
watching Sleeping Beauty
through her glass coffin,
fogging the lid with his breath,
licking his lips, and…
liar
Liar on a wire,
hanging by
a thread,
truth swings
her scythe,
wants you dead
for trying to hide
her scarred face
with a veil of beauty.
scars
her flesh is
lined/
wrinkled/
marked/
worn from
years of
service/
her beauty
is written
in her scars
whittling
she pares herself
one layer at a time,
each more tender
than the last,
hoping to find
something beautiful,
before she disappears.
daisy
They say Daisy
is pretty,
but Rose
is sublime.
Now Daisy is
melancholy.
She wishes she were
beautiful.
barefoot
The click clack
of her heels
on the pavement
was a metronome
for an anxious
song of chasing
handsome
phantoms,
tripping into traps,
being a wide-footed
booby in a city
of angry swans.
So she strayed
from the arcade,
slipped off her shoes,
and ran away
on bare feet.
too
she is too
fat/thin
tall/short
dark/light
strong/weak
big/small
curly/straight
butch/femme
for beauty
beauty boxed
beauty is
a box,
a tastefully
wrapped
set of limits
that may stunt
your growth
bound
her body
was too loose
and free,
so she bound it,
wrapping it
tighter/
tighter/
tighter/
until she
couldn’t speak
a single word,
not even
Help
clay
her body is
stubborn clay,
denying the
sculptor’s vision
of beauty.
it takes
any damn shape
it wants.
the beautiful one
some talk
some walk
some sing
some yell
some whisper
some warn
some squeal
some soothe
some yelp
some help
they’re all
beautiful
when they’re
being themselves
the half life of beauty
beauty beguiles
the hungry eyes
and helps the bored
to fantasize.
It tells pretty truths
and lovely lies
it grows and blooms
and quickly dies
little arbiters
a trillion little arbiters
of beauty
look and judge
and share their
cruel verdicts
with a hungry
and indifferent
invisible
risible
world
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