Maura Stanton
October 2006

Poem on a Forbidden Subject

As I lean over the podium surveying two hundred bright blank faces enrolled in my Intro to Poetry Writing class, I hold up a small stuffed animal.   It’s the teddy bear that sits on my desk at home, a gift my brother gave me as a joke on my 50th birthday.   I look at the class.  I tell them Never, Do Not Ever (this semester) write a poem about a teddy bear—Do Not, Please, in long or short lines, describe any bear’s torn ear (especially if it rhymes with dear), and don’t extemporize over the glass eye hanging by a thread, the lumpy stuffing, the soiled plush, and the little bear heart beating deep.  Then the class files out, some muttering about the way I’m stifling creativity, and I pack away my nameless teddy bear, dropping him down on my umbrella.  But as I cross the campus, briefcase slung over my shoulder, I know my bear’s in there struggling for air and feeling sad about my hard-heartedness towards helpless stuffed animals, and other victims I won’t allow to enter the realm of feeling—like the sidewalk cruelly stretched under my feet, the grass crushed and sighing when I short-cut across it, and especially the floorboards in my living room, that creak as I stomp over them, each board dreaming about the forest in spring, remembering the sweet breeze and the chartreuse brightness of  new leaves.  I go out on my patio.  Nature peers at me from many sad eyes, but I refuse to look back, just as I refuse to acknowledge the plastic pirate without legs that I stick in a geranium pot year after year, even though I know that all summer long he’s trying to climb out of the dirt, and get back to his ship.  And, yes, I wish he could reach that ship, and sail away among the clouds. . . . the clouds passing over. . . .here and there . . . .those drifting clouds.

                                                                                          

first published in Calapooya  (Spring/Summer 2002).