Hello, Poetry Friend
Welcome back to my occasional series, sharing poems inspired by reading and rereading Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter.
This poem comes from one of those golden Undet inserts, on page 235 (part 3, chapter 4 of The Wreath), when Lavrans brings home a bear cub to cheer up Ulvhild. Warning: objective correlative alert! The poem is in Lavrans’ voice.
Bear
I brought the bear into my own house
the year of the drought
when I killed a mother
bear, saved her cub
tucked him inside my tunic to make my daughter smile.
She did smile
but not my wife: What are you going to do with that?
She had known bears I did not know she had known
for all these years
I will fatten up this bear and tie it to the bedpost of my maidens! I laughed
but no one else did
for there was no milk and no way
to tame a wild beast who wants to be tied
to a woman. I killed the cub.
I brought the bear into my own house.
– Megan Willome
May you find poems hidden in your stories.
Happy poeming!
Megan
"she had known bears I did not know she had known."