Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

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Willawaw Journal

Willawaw Journal is an online magazine for poetry and art, published twice a year–Fall and Spring. Each issue features the poem prompt of a northwest poet laureate with a model response from the editor who may also promote a theme. Our mission is to encourage writers and artists to create, and to generate a community where a diversity of voices is welcome.

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For Willawaw Journal,  Fall 2021, the poem prompt was “On the Death of Seamus Heaney” by Alaska Poet Laureate Tom Sexton. The editor invited artists and poets to respond to this poem or to create a poem of their own which speaks to a personal connection they may have with a fellow poet or poem, renowned or otherwise.

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Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Fall 2021–Tom Sexton

We hope Tom Sexton’s poem “On the Death of Seamus Heaney” will inspire you, as a reader, to discover a feeling you hadn’t named before or a resonance you hadn’t expected. For the writer/artist, let the poem- as-prompt carry you to some place new in your work.

On the Death of Seamus Heaney

He is crossing those four green fields now.
On the horizon, blossoms falling like snow.
A chorus calls his name. He does not break stride
toward a small house. He can hear his mother’s sigh.
Now he eyes his father holding a tall ladder
and at the top of the ladder stands his brother
skimming the gable, shaping the letters S.H.
in wet plaster. It covers his hands and knees
as blood did on the day he died. They turn
to go inside where his mother is churning butter.

 

“On the Death of Seamus Heaney” from A Ladder of Cranes by Tom Sexton, copyright© 2015. Reprinted by permission of University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks. All rights reserved.

More About the Poet Laureate Poem Prompt

The Editor

Rachel Barton is a poet, teacher, writing coach, and editor. She earned a B.A. in English from West Virginia University where she also pursued graduate studies in the art of printmaking. Drawn to Alaska by an older sister, she continued to pull lithographs at the Visual Arts Center until her new family began to manifest. From there, she dove into clay and watercolor. Upon her arrival in the Northwest 25 years later, she earned a Masters in Teaching from Western Oregon University. It was while teaching that she became acquainted with the Oregon Writing Project where she resumed her writing life.
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