Bear Underground

A brief note: this poem is part of a year-long 72 poem cycle I wrote from October 2023-October 2024 and published on Medium in Scribe.

"Having been invited by a bear, I set out on a walk." Hiromi Kawakami, Kamisama as translated by Michael Emmerich

Great bear

Curled in your den,

Just below the earth,

An opening to crawl through

Bringing your harvest with you

Between layers of fur and skin and flesh.

And your little ones with mouths to feed.

~~~

There to see visions and dream dreams.

Bringing summer’s light with you

To the nether regions to light your way,

Dreaming the wood that is no longer,

Of bears once known but no longer encountered.

~~~

Dreaming into the great meadows in the woods,

The drinking from the stream

and catching the slippery fish.

Dreaming the wild honey

and its guardian bees.

~~~

Your loosened spirit wanders

Through silent white woods lit by the moon

Or stands guard on the rock above your being

As you lay entranced in your visions

Through the cold,

In commune with your maker.

~~~

It waits and watches,

Nose upward to the big bear and the little bear

Revolving in their nighttime travels,

And listens to their speech,

Finding true north in their voices.

~~~

The rumble of ever-increasing cars

Like constant earthquakes on the surface of the earth,

And the digging of machines

Driving further down each year,

Entire forests bowing before them in surrender.

~~~

The sounds rising in their waves,

Cluttering the atmosphere in lines

Converging on a single point,

An imitation star in the sky,

Turning them back on themselves.

~~~

The easy meals, taken,

Without a prayer of gratitude,

From overflowing trash cans,

Reducing your majesty.

~~~

Leaving your traditions behind as we leave ours,

The voice of eternity fading,

Drowning in the cacophonous years

Of lengthening separation from the source.

Anxiety clouding your sleep,

The portion of your life which is eight hours to us,

Taken in chunks of months.

~~~

The cold penetrates the earthen womb in which you lay,

Throwing one gleam of light on the solstice,

Feeling the shifting of the planet beneath your body,

Aware of the gradual lengthening of days,

The scent of green leaves emerging,

And the upward surge of sap,

Into awareness,

Until the passing equinox brings you out.

~~~

Close to the surface of motion and change,

Below the ground,

In repose,

Dream the world into a better course,

As you rest in the darkness

The answer just outside your grasp.

****

In the traditional Japanese calendar, the four seasons were arranged and divided around the seasonal solstice or equinox, with three seasons falling before and three after each solar marker. The twenty-four resulting seasons were each broken into three micro-seasons lasting about five days for a total of seventy-two micro-seasons.

This poem is the second in the third of six winter seasons: Taisetsu (大雪) the season of Greater Snow. The winter solstice on the 21st of December marks the turning point of winter.

The three micro-seasons of taisetsu are:

December 7–11 Cold Sets In, Winter Begins ( 閉塞成冬 sora samuku fuyu to naru)

December 12–16 Bears Start Hibernating in Their Dens (熊蟄穴 kuma ana ni komoru)

December 17–21 Salmon Gather and Swim Upstream (鱖魚群 sake no uo muragaru)

On my experience with bears:

The first line from Kamisama (God), the debut short story by Hiromi Kawakami, introduced my first exploration into Japanese literature. The story was first published in 1994 in GQJapan and subsequently won prestigious literary prizes throughout 1998 in the Kawakami short story collection of the same name. I found Kamisama in its original Japanese with a partial side-by-side translation edited by Michael Emmerich in a short story collection called “Read Real Japanese” published by Kodansha. It is one of my favorite stories.

I saw a black bear this year. She had three cubs and was ambling toward the stream beyond our property fence. She had just finished tearing the siding off and breaking the windows of my neighbor’s bee shed, breaking apart all of his hives. When I shouted, she turned around and looked at me for a moment, then continued on her way to water. With the modern technology of neighbors, she was tracked all summer and made a circuit of about five miles. Though I never saw her again, I was able to find out where she was likely to be on any given day.

I began writing this group of planned seventy-two poems in October of 2023. If you have a Medium Subscription, I invite you to read past and future poems in this cycle saved in a list on my profile page: Micro-Season Poem Cycle.

Thank you for reading and supporting my writing. It means the world to me. And thank you to my editor at Scribe, Thomas Gaudex, for supporting this project.

Natalie