bear poem
Maggie Koons
Here is a poem written by a fourth-grader. What happened was a bear cub sheltered on the elementary school’s playground. While everyone else was socializing, this fourth-grade girl wrote a poem. I guess the teacher thought it was sweet. The local news was involved. She doesn’t remember which station. She was wearing a pretty horrible tie-dyed shirt. Okay I forget the title but:
“A bear came onto the playground today
It is young so it obviously came to play
There it was chased into a tree
Where it had to go to sleep.”
Um “…something something glad
to the home that it had…”
Okay but the ending slapped:
“But oh we know that as he grows we will grow too
and we’ll go into that world unknown.”
I like it because it’s so embarrassing, and here’s something even more embarrassing, a few days later a girl recognized me in the hall, she asked me if I was the one on TV, and yes I was, and the only thing more embarrassing than that whole story is me submitting it to a literary magazine.
Maggie Koons is online at maggiekoons.com.