Dead Butterfly by Ellen Bass : American Life in Poetry

The Poetry Foundation

Library of Congress

University of Nebraska
at Lincoln

American Life in Poetry: Column 164

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

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 © 2007 by Ellen Bass and reprinted from “The Human Line,” 2007, by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Introduction copyright © 2009 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.

POEM SEARCH