American Life in Poetry: Column 164
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.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation
(www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported
by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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.  The introduction's
author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 
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