Read the poems by Michael Sowder in the attachment, and then answer one of these questions:
1. Images are phrases that make you see, hear, taste, feel, or smell. Poets use images to convey the meaning they hope readers will get from their poems. Choose one of the poems, identify the images it contains, and explain how each image contributes to the meaning Michael Sowder hopes you will take from the poem.
2. In a poem, things change from the beginning to the end of the poem--both the situation and also what the speaker and the reader understand about what is happening and what it means. Choose one of the poems and describe what changes from the beginning to the ending, both in terms of situation and meaning.
Three Poems by Michael Sowder
The beach was a field of ice,
thick enough to walk on, though now
and again your foot broke through to sand.
We pulled our hoods around our eyes,
making tiny windows on the world.
Wind roared in over the surf, flattened
the down against our bodies, so my love
and I steadied each other as we walked.
Into the blind sun and minus-zero wind
you could look for only a moment,
but you wanted to look, for the wind
lifted the waves, and the sun
struck the risen water green
like cut glass that shattered on the shore
as if white were the essence of green.
Fish appeared beneath our feet,
thousands, identical—with silver sides,
sapphire bellies, and dark gray fins,
blue comets as far as you could see
frozen in every expression of fish life:
leaping, wriggling, squirming;
groups darting to one side,
others strangely arranged
in pinwheels, spirals, bracelets at our feet.
In the distance the lighthouse that marked
the trail to our cabin stood an hour away,
so we hiked upon the glittering bodies,
across a jeweled cemetery,
an illuminated manuscript
we were tongueless and terrified to read.
My Grandfather from
was like a stranger coming into our house,
taking a bed at the end of his life.
And through his last months I sat with him—
making sandwiches between classes,
buying lighter fluid and Lucky Strikes,
changing his bed clothes, cleaning every day
his bedside toilet.
He talked about his old life—
the tobacco farm, cat fishing on summer nights,
his wife the best rifle shot in the county—
while the months became weeks, then days.
One morning in his room in St. Francis’—
where they moved him the day I found
his toilet full of blood—
he turned to me eyes as clear
as ten o’clock light, and asked
when I would take him across the street?
There outside the window cars stood gleaming
in the lot, where he said the grass was soft.
In the last days, there was little to be done.
He could no longer talk. Yet his eyes watched me
as I rubbed white lotion on his feet, and counted back
five generations until my father’s family
disappeared in the
I wasn’t there the last night.
I was out in the field behind the house.
The trees stood around the field like great dark birds
speckled with stars, and at a certain moment, I knew,
and kept walking—remembering trails with my father,
the first owl I ever saw, first indigo bunting
in its ecstasy of blue,
the first fawn, spotted and awkward,
all the exquisite strangers of the world
my grandfather released with open hands.
Wapiti
Late October. Grizzly Country.
My wife and I sleeping under stars.
I wake to perfume of alpine fir
and a shadow coming toward us.
A great bull elk
grazes the meadow above,
pawing at the ground. Clouds of breath
hover around his face, and when he lifts his head
the sky is filled with antlers, like hooks
thrown for stars. Wapiti,
we are lost, this woman and I,
we are losing each other in the world.
Wind tosses the tops of cedars. A glitter
of stars and runaway clouds.
The undertow of sleep pulls and pulls,
washing the world away.
A clatter of hooves along the edges
of dream comfort like sounds in a kitchen
heard in childhood beds, saying,
Sleep, child, no danger is near.
Tonight, you are safe on open ground.
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