Sample Poems

(Note:  These poems are based on fairy tales that were NOT written by Andersen. Use them only as a guide to generate possible ideas. You should not use Beauty and the Beast or Sleeping Beauty or any fairy tale not written by Andersen as material)

Beauty and the Beast

Jaimes Alsop

1. The Beast

Knowing how you loved the birds

I fixed them to the trees

so they wouldn’t fly away.

So you would stay.

And you remained silent

and never questioned my bloody palms

or reproached me the birds

because they didn’t sing.

It couldn’t last, of course.

No new birds came and those crucified

were taken by small animals or simply

disappeared from the nails.

I was sure then that you would leave me.

Finally I confessed.

Trembling, I brought you the hammer

and showed my broken fingers.

Leaves and branches in my hair,

the diagrams of Autumn

on the sky.

And you smiled and said it didn’t matter

about the birds

and drank at my tears

like a rare and fragile wine

that they too would not be wasted.

2. Beauty

I came to you so carelessly

there were those who thought I had not been warned.

I could only point to the false lovers who carried marks

where you had pressed coins into their palms

and admit I was impatient for your scars.

The rumours followed us as easily

as if you murdered me every night;

hemlock in my evening wine,

a loosened bannister on the stair.

The dull villagers and daft princes

waited still and at distances

for grave news and relentless

until I could only point again

at their jealous eyes and whisper

I had discovered why you handled me

as though I were made of glass.

I know they want to know about our bodies.

Our virginity confuses them

and they are reduced to words and silences.

What shall we allow them to believe?

We are a thousand years old, no histories

and nothing to confess.

Briar Rose

Debra Cash

(Note: Based on The Sleeping Beauty)

A hundred years of dreams —

I would not have given up an hour

of those shifting landscapes, the tower, the lagoon

the rough roses making a cradle around my bed.

Everything stops

for me and for everyone else I know

while behind my wincing eyelids I absorb

my parents’ recklessness.

We wanted the best for you, they’ll tell me:

all those girlish virtues

a pretty face and figure, kindness to the poor

the ability to sing and play the spinet.

Inviting the colors of the rainbow to my Christening,

spraying me with holy white light,

they locked out one color of the spectrum

the darkness that absorbs it all

and I blame my father. Maleficent came to his birth

just as surely as she did to mine:

the difference is that everyone knew her then

when her name was Poverty and Need

and the guests all bowed their heads. In our day,

my birthday, no one expected her.

Evil, they called her. I call her

Resentment. Fury. Locked away, I dream

and no one tells me what to do.

No one breaks in. And when a stranger offers me a spindle

glistening, sexual, I sink into the pillows

and remember the worst has already happened:

I have survived death and turned it into sleep

and a dream lasting one hundred years.

When I wake

I will know my lover’s face.