Clarion Reminder
The powerful provoke the powerless
to push against one another.
Their power grows by keeping us
in all kinds of prisons.
Yet we are not powerless.
Remember the black bear
roaming Clarion County, Pennsylvania,
its head trapped a month or more
in a metal-ringed pail.
Remember those who chased it for hours,
grabbed it in a perilous embrace,
carefully sawed loose those tight bonds.
Imagine what they felt as the bear
ran free into the woods.
Imagine too, the bear.
Laura Grace Weldon
Originally published in Writers Resist. Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
Laura Grace Weldon 
What a beautiful story. Surely someone is coming soon with a saw. 🙂 love, in lak’ech, Debra
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And all that read your beautiful poem feels a little of the releasers’ and the bear’s joy.
Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing.
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