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from the issue of June 12, 2008
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American Life in Poetry
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
How often have you wondered what might be going on inside a child's head? They can be so much more free and playful with their imaginations than adults, and are so good at keeping those flights of fancy secret and mysterious, that even if we were told what they were thinking we might not be able to make much sense of it. Here Ellen Bass, of Santa Cruz, California, tells us of one such experience.
Dead Butterfly
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the
dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside
the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her
pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived - so briefly - in its
glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her
father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl
she became there?
This plump child in her
rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back
inside me
and carry safe again. What was
her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead
winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar.
Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Ellen Bass and reprinted from "The Human Line," 2007, by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. This column is made possible by the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) and supported by the UNL Department of English. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
GO TO: ISSUE OF JUNE 12
ARTS HEADLINES FOR JUNE 12
Plains museum hosts Kirsch exhibit
American Life in Poetry
Blakelock paintings on view in Sheldon collection galleries
Fountain Frolics through July 31
Great Plains Studies Friends purchase Rey painting
Repertory Theater hosts June 14 panel discussion
733205S38290X
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