The Poetry Stash: 09Feb2023

Today’s poem is “A Green Crab’s Shell” by Mark Doty from the collection Fire to Fire, New and Selected Poems. The book is available for purchase here.

A Green Crab’s Shell by Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like—

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws’

gesture of menace
and power. A gull’s
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse—
open to reveal

a shocking Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer’s firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad to die,

if we could be opened
into this—
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed sky.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “What color is…?”
2.	Begin with “evidence suggests…”
3.	Think about a piece of an object that you once found while on a walk outside or on the floor inside. What did it look like, smell like? Describe its texture. Imagine what it once was a part of. Maybe it’s something that’s extinct or create something that’s yet to exist.
4.	What does mortality mean to you?
5.	Write a draft with no line breaks as if it were prose. Now, revise the draft into 3-line stanzas (tercets). 

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