The bear and the sunflower - a fairy tale
Once upon a time,A bear woke from its hibernation.
The bear yawned and stretched,
Yawned and stretched, then bellowed
A hungry roar, scaring the creatures
Outside its cold, dark cave.
The bear was ravenous for it
Had not eaten for many months.
Surely there would be food aplenty
In its teeming territory? But no,
There was nothing to consume except
The melting snow and ice.
The bear's menacing roar had frightened
The other animals that lived in its domain.
They had fled to other parts of the countryside,
To places that offered protection and refuge
From the rampaging bear. It was time for
The bear to search for a meal beyond its homeland.
After days and days of stomping through thickets,
Wading across rivers, and climbing over sharp rocks,
The bedraggled bear came across a waving sea of sunflowers.
The bear had not seen such flowers before, but as a
Herbivore it felt instinctively that they were edible.
The bear belched and licked its lips.
Such was the depth of the bear's hunger that it
Decided to devour the entire population of sunflowers.
The bear uprooted flower after flower, gorging on roots and stems.
But the bright yellow petals were bitter and the bear spat them out.
'Bah, how dare this puny plant spoil my appetite', the bear screamed.
'I'll teach it not to offend my taste buds'.
And it came to pass that the bear went berserk
And rampaged through the sunflower fields,
Tearing out all the flowers and trampling them into the ground.
At the end of the orgy, all the flowers lay flat on the crushed earth.
The bear was replete with revenge and left the scene to forage elsewhere.
But little did it know its destruction had released millions of new seeds.
Poetry by Christopher Fernie
Read 188 times
Written on 2022-10-11 at 15:21
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