Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Samuel Green, poet and editor, writes about the Pacific Northwest landscape “with accessible, elemental observations of life’s small turns.” He has written eleven collections of poetry, including Washington State Book Award winner The Grace of Necessity (2008) and Vertebrae: Poems 1978–1994 (1997).

Green was named the first Washington State poet laureate in 2007. He is also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Green grew up in Washington State. After a tour with the Coast Guard, he was educated at Highline Community College and Western Washington University, where he earned a BA and an MA. He has taught at Seattle University and is the founding editor of Brooding Heron Press, which he runs with his wife, Sally, on Washington State’s remote Waldron Island.

(The information in this short bio was drawn in part from Poetry.org.)

I shot this one by the upper pond of the farm
after watching the rings trout made rising
to flies, watching small birds pace the backs
of cows, hoping all the time she would run.

My grandmother told me they damaged her garden.

I think it was a way to make the killing
lighter. She never let me clean them, only asked
I bring them headless to her. I bring this one
to the fir block near the house, use the single-
bitted axe with the nick in the lower crescent
of the blade, smell the slow fire
in the smoke-house, salmon changing
to something sweet & dark. A fly turns
in a bead of blood on my boot. I tuck
the head in a hole beside the dusty globes
of ripened currants, talk quiet to the barn cat.

In her kitchen my grandmother whets the thin blade
of her Barlow, makes a series of quick, clever cuts, then tugs
off the skin like a child’s sweater. This one was
pregnant. She pulls out a row of unborn rabbits
like the sleeve of a shirt with a series of knots.
The offal is dropped in a bucket. Each joint gives way
beneath her knife as though it wants
to come undone, as though she knows some secret
about how things fit together. I have killed
a hundred rabbits since I was eight.

This will be the last.

I am twenty, & about to go back
to the war that killed my cousin in Kin Hoa,
which is one more name she can’t pronounce.
I haven’t told her about the dead,
and she won’t ask. She rolls the meat
in flour & pepper & salt, & lays it
in a skillet of oil that spits like a cat.
She cannot save a single boy who carries a gun.
All she can do is feed this one.

The poem, “Grandmother, Cleaning a Rabbit,” appears in All That Might Be Done (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2014). Used with permission from the author.

watch the egret pace the backs of cows
in broad daylight stay

until the dark falls like a moth-eaten curtain
stars poking through from the other side see

the nick in the lower crescent of the moon
no bead of blood on my sleeve can explain

salmon swimming upstream for something
final and primal  I haven’t told you

about the dead how their stories wander
in spirals grow lighter as they go higher

re-shape the past around fire cast a line
into the waters of your future how things fit

together like some secret guarded
by the crescent waxing gibbous as a great blue

heron swoops low over the creek you see
before the dog can startle a flash

of the crest the broad span of open wings

Rachel Barton:  Though I chose Samuel Green’s poem for its powerful imagery and emotional impact, I did not connect directly to the content; I couldn’t draw from the experience of hunting or killing animals as I had none. So I listed the phrases that I found most compelling and began to weave them together until I found a poem of my own.