What does it mean?
asks one as we stand in the wind
of a gray plain and tilt our faces
toward a crater’s living steam.
Behind us shrubby trees
grow in patches
among the clean white spikes
of the countless dead.
As they crisscross the air
around our knees, grasshoppers
click their yellow wings.
They mean to find each other
and breed in the heat
we mean to stop making.
This poem first appeared in Not For Luck (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021).
—
Derek Sheffield is the eighth poet laureate of Washington State (2025-2027). He is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.
