Bears And Great Writers Poem by Michael Pruchnicki

Every time I glance up at the framed
lithograph of a bear sitting at its ease
leafing through the pages of A Bears Guide
I imagine a band of shaggy brother bears
traveling to a camp on the Yellowstone
in Montana for a summertime confabulation
on the great writers of the twentieth century!

Of course John Steinbeck rates four stars
followed by William Faulkner and Jack London
of Yoknapatawpha county and frigid Alaska,
home territory to large contentious mammals
and their fictional canine companions
which wander the vast wildernesses
of the bearish imagination.

When it came to bearlike Ernest Hemingway
and the urbane F. Scott Fitzgerald, however,
bear fans disagreed and roared and growled,
tore up the trees and rolled granite boulders
down the green hills into the Yellowstone.

But when James Joyce and his stream
of consciousness was brought up,
bears left piles of scat in quiet meadows
and defiled the landscape with ursine
opinions of a literary Irishman
and his obscure, unintelligible
and obscene books!