John Haines: Alaska’s poet laureate

• Fairbanks Under the Solstice
• Slowly, without sun, the day sinks
• toward the close of December.
• It is minus sixty degrees.

• Over the sleeping houses a dense
• fog rises—smoke from banked fires,
• and the snowy breath of an abyss
• through which the cold town
• is perceptibly falling.

• As if Death were a voice made visible, 
• with the power of illumination...

• Now, in the white shadow
• of those streets, ghostly newsboys
• make their rounds, delivering 
• to the homes of those
• who have died of the frost
• word of the resurrection of Silence.

• A Poem Like a Grenade
• It is made to be rolled down
• a flight of stairs, 
• placed under a guilty hat, 
• or casually dropped into a basket
• among the desks
• of the wrongheaded statesmen.

• As it tumbled on the carpeted stairs
• or settles quietly 
• in its wire-wicker nest, 
• it begins to unfold, 
• a ragged flower whose raw petals 
• burn and scar...

• Its wastepaper soil catches fire, 
• the hat is blown from its hook.
• Five or six faces are suddenly, 
• permanently changed...

• There will be many poems written
• in the shape of a grenade - 
• one hard piece of metal flying off
• might even topple a government. 

John Haines (1924-2011) was an American poet and poet laureate of Alaska from 1969 until his death. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Haines moved to Washington, D.C. before moving to Alaska, where he homesteaded from 1949 to 1969, at which time he moved to San Diego, only to return to the Land of the Midnight Sun several years later. Having published nine books of poetry in his lifetime, Haines wrote mostly about nature — based on his experiences as a trapper, hunter, and homesteader. Much of his poetry reveals the influences of Alaska — full of stark imagery and often set amid the wilderness beauty of his adopted state.