Talisman

Samuel Green

for Phyllis Ennes, 1928-2013

If her father were here
with those hands that knew
how to coax stories
from wood, we’d ask him
to carve her in cedar
as Raven Stealing the Sun
which he could then saw
into sections the size
of a greengrocer’s thumb,
then fit them back together
with intricate joins, cunning
latches, so those who loved her
might take her apart,
each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather, a clear & clever
eye, a portion of beak,
until all that’s left
is the brilliant berry of light
she brought us—
if her father hadn’t gone
into darkness before her,
if she hadn’t already
given herself away
one thoughtful offering
at a time.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Samuel Green’s “Talisman,” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

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Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Photo of Samuel Green

Samuel Green, author of twelve collections of poetry, has lived off the grid for nearly forty years on remote Waldron Island. With his wife, Sally, he is co-editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press. He has been a visiting professor at multiple colleges and universities, and was selected as the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Other honors include an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, an Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, a Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and an Honorary Doctorate from Seattle University. From 1966-1970, he was in the U.S. Coast Guard, with service in Viet Nam.

Cover of Disturbing the Light

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Carnegie Mellon University

"Samuel Green writes poems that are as elegant as Shaker furniture, plain in the way the columns of the Parthenon are plain. His poems are unostentatiously beautiful, built of memory and the imagination much of memory is made of. They do not show off, they just matter. Read this new collection and it will help you remember that the best poems, like almost anything else, are also handmade."
—Robert Wrigley

"Samuel Green’s Disturbing the Light is a love letter to a hard-earned life, one that traces the long journey of a war-weary soul to a place of love and light. It’s a meditation on family and labor and the natural world that does not avert its gaze from that which must be said."
—Brian Turner

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