July 2023
Bio Note: Hello, everyone—it's a pleasure to join such excellent company again in the V-V community. Thanks for reading this prose poem—I hope it captures the moment and perhaps some of the fullness of watching a grizzly teach her cubs to fish. Thanks to Jim and all the editors for keeping Verse-Virtual a vibrant and special place.
Kenai
The hosts woke us, a quiet tap on the door where we slept in bunks with a blanket over the window, Alaskan summer nights darkening only to twilight. They made coffee in the small, clean kitchen, a local steam, rising, as we struggled into clothes, faces pale with sleep, to join them on the deck. Below us, cedar fog, the land a flat grey bowl of blueberries, that fragrant aquamarine hour. A grunting, almost pig-like,
a warning scent of something large and wild: mussel-slick with rain and fog, a mother grizzly and two cubs, a flat-footed easing from the treeline to a bend in the river below us, the moving water a muted pewter in the palette of almost-morning. She knew we were there, of course she did—she smelled us, strange as salamanders with coffee cups. She bent to watch the water, the silvered edge of it, seeing through:
with fast claw snagged a salmon heavy with eggs, cast it flopping on the bank before her cubs’ fascinated eyes, gutted it cleanly, held down with one massive foot, sliced and pulled empty with the other, the roe like coins, ochre treasure strewn before her young: the same lesson I learned at my grandmother’s side,
sitting high above the garden on her front porch swing, snapping beans into an old pot, sliding sweet corn from its green sleeve, hunting morels and ginseng in the forest: this gift of how to feed oneself, how to harvest what is full and ripe, how to eat, how to taste the difference between want and need.
©2023 Lori Howe
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL