Hunger I

The black bear comes to my yard as if invited. Her shadow trails
beside her. The rising curtain before a one-act play. Her graceful,
slow rumble. A walking mountain. She sways, shakes her head, sits
in front of my apple tree. She fills every space, center stage, focuses
on the dangling sweets, those red light, the hypnotic ripeness. I know
this hunger. She snorts. The tree whispers back. She strains for the
low-hanging apple. She bends the branches to her will, sniffs each
one. She paws one back and forth like a boxer warming up. It
loosens, lands at her feet. She consumes one, two, three, four before
she leaves. Now I am alone, yet my appetite remains.

M. E. Silverman had 2 books of poems published and co-edited Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. @4ME2Silver