Poem for the Day: Bear About Town

I'm jealous of the big brown bear in my daughter's board book. I long for his tall, European townhouse, where every room sings in plum purples and cherry reds. The rooms are so pretty you want to eat them like hard candy.

Too, I want Bear's town, where everyone waves with innocuous paws that could crush a child in a minute but instead accomplish dainty tasks, like pouring tea, tying tiny apron strings, holding petite packages containing yellow clocks and iced cakes with cherries perched on top.

Fat bumblebees never sting but hover and buzz in the ears of the bears who love them, who love their park with the empty bench and the bunches of balloons held by small bears and grinned upon by old bears.

The bakery, jam-packed with baguettes and impossible chocolate cakes and confections, does not demand money, only a toothy smile, and all the teeth in bear's town are for tearing crusty bread and biting into pies made from plums from Grandma's orchard, studded with candles for a small bear's birthday as his drum-playing cousin bears beat a syncopated racket.

Rabbits, who are just rabbits, live in bushes at the foot of creamy green, teardrop trees, on top of a hill packed with clean Holland-like streets with tulips sprouting from windowsills and a playground that still has a merry-go-round because little bears never break arms or legs or smash their furry heads but play and play until dark under the chimneys of their town that spout nontoxic smoke into a darkening sky full of goodwill and bear acceptance and three striped birds that my daughter counts:

one, two, three,
before we close the book.