Ten of the Best Mirror Poems

Mirrors are fascinating things. They offer a reflection of what is set before them, but have no power to act on their own. Even so, we give them power capable of bestowing life and value, of making proclamations carrying great weight when, in fact, they do no more than state the obvious. And if the glass is still a bit steamy from the morning’s shower, then they don’t even manage to do that.

As though empowering the looking-glass were not enough, we often ask others to be a mirror for us, to reflect us back to ourselves, forgetting in the process that a person can’t do the work of a mirror without first altering the image in the process—sometimes, unfortunately, to our great unhappiness.

A suggestion: if you need a mirror that is not a mirror, try using a poem rather than a loved one. You’ll often find the poem will guide your self-reflection, and perhaps help keep loved ones being loved. If you want to make it a little meta, try using a poem about mirrors to mirror yourself. To get you started, here are ten great mirror poems, with nary a discouraging three-way in the bunch.

1. How Arguments Go

1

Pieces never tell the whole story.
Safety glass still breaks;
it just doesn’t shatter.

Heat escapes through clear glass,
its pattern unseen in fragments
but no less visible.

Opaque glass,
like shades pulled against sun,
hides what most any fool can catch in light.

2

She’s got her side. He has his.

Chipped words go air-borne
when thrown against the mirror.

Clean-up happens by fits and starts.

3

Cuts can be on the surface,
unremarked,

or slide slickly along fault lines.

Sometimes it takes a probe
and a camera’s eye to show you

what you’re looking for.

4

Windows in wind rattle,
at night shadow

Roughed edges
slivers

the dog’s bone half-consumed.

—Maureen Doallas, from Neruda’s Memoirs

BUY ‘HOW TO WRITE A FORM POEM’ NOW!

2. Sleeping in Grandmother Wolfe’s House

Buried here in sheets in this darkened room,
sometimes time sits heavy on the soul.
Some evenings with a last over-the-shudder
look out the window, Red finds herself receding
further, further back, to stone, becoming
the dead thing that fell from the branch,
or the bird-bitten, unplucked callow drupe.

This is the bed where she was born.
The mirror tipped in its walnut frame pins her
flat against the wall, same axe-blade face
suspended there above a crocheted doily
that her grandmother saw, that woman
whose knife pared each portion to its core,
the crevassed heart of apricot and plum.

—Anne M. Doe Overstreet, from Delicate Machinery Suspended

3. Leda

My sister tells a story about a swan and a jeweled strand.
I have never thought of myself as a bird before.
A heron stabs after the half moon among the current,
then lifts off, carving into the horizon.
The sea shirs the sand where my foot rests.
Caught in the mirror, her daughter blooms pale,
hung from the morning like a pearl pendant.

—Anne M. Doe Overstreet, from Delicate Machinery Suspended

Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series

4. When the Sick Find Their Answer


                When I was little/I was afraid of my own
                heart/a fist trying to get out… —Karen G

I was never taught to say I love you
to myself. The ten commandments

all start with “Thou Shalt Not.” So
I didn’t. And look how much it’s cost

me: When I was little, I was afraid
of everything. My heart, that fist,

beat me silly with the love it had
to give others. It’s taken till now to

see my rib cage as a bird cage, a jail,
to see even my teeth a fence, holding

back as much as they take in. More.
Biting and chewing carefully every

thing Mouth takes in, mulling it over,
swallowing secrets it might have told

Mirror, that reflection waiting, that
little girl grown up, now grown so old.

—Paula J. Lambert, from The Sudden Seduction of Gravity

 5. The Gift

You won’t know which way
to hold it, my father said,

his Christmas gift
a painted girl with felt eyes

and blonde yarn hair
on the back of an oval mirror.

But with shame and fear
as if from nakedness

I ran to the frozen river
covering her laughing mouth

branches, fragments of glass

not knowing that seven
months later a tan-armed boy

would say Look, this washed up
in the sand, how she would

startle me: a ghost child
with her smiling face

purple lips
and fading yellow hair—

Green eyes
in my green eyes.

—Amy Billone, from The Light Changes

Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series

6. Weighing 

Shaving,
I wonder how much the mirror
would weigh

with nothing in it.

I step away,
step back,
touch glass with fingertips.

Every day I do this,

looking at the face
I’ve earned
with countless joys and griefs.

One day I will shave and do

the ritual not knowing
it is the last time.
Every morning I am rehearsing

saying goodbye to myself.

—Neil Carpathios, author of Beyond the Bones
 

 7.

The glass I got in Venice
is a mirror
is the iris in your eye
is the color of bruises.

—Luci Shaw, The Cinnamon Beetle Twitter Party

8. Ascension

Apollo’s angels
will come at different hours
lifting high their delicate hands

praising the wind
that wraps itself
around the feet of God

Apollo’s angels
will leap in mirrored halls
finding the heart that beats in time

with satined feet;
they will come
waving chiffon

on currents of perfumed air, there will be
no memory of their movements
beyond these bodies

that knew this prayer.

—L. L. Barkat, author of Love, Etc.

Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series

9. Prelude 

In the pause between spring rain
a woman pirouettes in a field.

Her skin is a thousand mirrors.

—Sholeh Wolpé, author of Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths

10. And the Ship Sails On

He faced the sink, one foot up
on the edge of the tub. She stood
behind him, reaching around.
In the mirror, her face rose
over his shoulder like the moon,
and like the moon she regarded him
beautifully but without feeling,
and he looked at her as he would
at the moon: How beautiful!
How distant! No smiling, no weeping,
no talking. A man and a woman
transacting their magnificent business
with the usual equanimity. The man
as a passenger walking the ship’s deck
at evening and the woman as the moon
over his shoulder oiling the ocean
with light. Deep in the ship’s belly
pistons churned and sailors fed
the boilers’ roar with coal. On deck
just the engine’s dull thrum and
a faint click as the woman sets her ring
on the cool white lip of the sink.

—Joel Brouwer, author of And So

Photo by L.L. Barkat.

Browse more poems by category

Buy How to Write a Poem Now!

• Author
• Recent Posts

Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Latest posts by Will Willingham (see all)

• Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
• The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
• Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022