True Story, 3rd Person by Scott Starbuck

 


One day far offshore I asked
the best deckhand I had
how he got to be so good.

He said, many years ago
his father left two boys
in the Alaskan wilderness

with nothing to eat
except a box of Bisquick
and a baited crab ring.

Many nights those boys waited
listening for footsteps
that never came.

They ate a lot of Bisquick,
a lot of crab,
and a lot of berries.

For entertainment
they invented stories
about forest shadows.

He pauses.  That is how
the boys learned to fish
and hunt.

Scott T. Starbuck’s 31-minute interview about The Warrior Poems and Other Poems is on his Poets & Writers Directory site.  If you only have 2 minutes, instead of 31, you can listen to him read a poem about his friend Erich and “Uncle Ed.”   His poetry chapbook The Warrior Poems was one of six finalists of over 500 entries at the 2009 Pudding House Chapbook Contest, featuring protest poems about human rights, animal rights, media distortions, Iraq War, sour economy, and the G.W. Bush presidency. It is available at jen@puddinghouse.com