Larry D. Thomas

Larry D. Thomas Poems

Larry D. Thomas Biography

Larry D. Thomas (born 1947) is an American poet. He was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, and in 2009 was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. Thomas was born in 1947 in the small west Texas town of Haskell. When he was three years old, the family moved to Midland, Texas, where he attended public schools through the eighth grade. In 1961 the family moved to Brownwood, Texas, where he attended Brownwood High School, graduating in 1965 as a member of the National Honor Society. After graduation from high school, he attended Howard Payne University in Brownwood for two years, supporting himself by working afternoons, evenings and weekends as a district circulation manager for the Brownwood Bulletin newspaper. He transferred to the University of Houston in 1967, attending night classes on a full-time basis until he graduated in 1970 with a B. A. degree in English literature. While attending the University of Houston, he supported himself through his full-time employment as a district caseworker for the Harris County Social Services Department.)

The Best Poem Of Larry D. Thomas

Crabber

from The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press, 2001)

Ninety years of Galveston sun
reign in her flesh like a bronze tattoo
needled indelibly into her face,
arms, and legs. Her throat's adorned
with a choker of perfect sharks' teeth,
hard, imperturbable as her squinty gaze.
Daily, during the summer months,

she takes fresh chicken necks, yanks string
around them tight as tourniquets,
grabs net and bucket and prances
the few yards from her shanty to the surf.
With nothing but her sense of touch, she works
her stringed necks like a master, easing
the net under the bellies of greedy crabs

and shaking them violently
to the bottom of her bucket. As she waits
for the next strike, she fixes her gaze
on the sea, matching its brute indifference
with the iciness of her stare,
the crabs clacking in the bucket like dominoes
shuffled by the age-blotched hands of old men,

fueling her dream of dropping big blue males
into a bubbling stockpot flaring her nostrils
with crab-boil, reddening their blue
in but minutes, their sweet, white meat
but briefly satisfying to her appetite
as the seven feckless husbands
whose cremated bodies she's dumped into the sea.

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