April is the Cruelest Month: A Poem a Day #1

Though I feel as if my creative juices are at 8% (and I'm getting warning messages from the operating system), I'm going to slog through the poem a day challenge with the hope that the exercises, sterile as they might be, will re-energize that part of me. Think of it as battery recharging.

I'm going to use prompts to get me going. Friend Steve Oka has promised to post an exercise a day (bless his heart) and I might draw from his repository on Facebook. On the other hand, since I've made my students create or find their own exercises this semester, I might take my own advice and do the same.  What else is the internet for -- except for doing my thinking for me?

I just found this exercise online at http://poetryprompts.tumblr.com/: Write a piece that contains a shark and/or bear.  Seems fitting, since there was one legendary Fiction Workshop semester where we became obsessed with the inclusion of bears.

*

On Bears

Pandas on YouTube climb over each other
Mother over cub, cub over Mother
a moiling
black and white Rorschach I imagine
as hot soft dust and can taste like morning cat fur
springing me into orange violet light
the dregs of a confused happiness trailing away
its unremembered dream

Roll winter's stone away from the tomb
and from the dark mouth watch the black bear shamble
blinking
into pine tree shadows, a breezy dance tight with
sharp evergreen to shrink the nostrils and
the muddy ground's unfurling into fecund rot
like a strangely delicate hug from those
crushing arms

Long ago we woke when the bear strolled through
our campsite, all shiny muscle and animal disregard
for our burling tents and the small smoke of someone's
fire
That was when our child was just forming
her humanity, becoming
The Most Important Girl Ever
spinning together from unimaginable atoms
our fragile lives
our joint story

The pandas on YouTube
cuff each other to the ground
roll over and under each other, Mother and child
a blur of movement, of potential violence
their love a celebration of force
withheld, of disaster
deliberately averted