Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 164

Dead Butterfly

Intro by Ted Kooser
05.21.2008

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.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. 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 © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.