Curled inside the polar night, the white bear sleeps in a shallow well of snow.
Her back to the keening wind, paw a soft pillow. In a broken swath of white,
now smudged by the long dark, the bear embodies the field, and the field
the dreaming bear, dreaming a sheath of ice that extends beyond the frame
of her ken, dreaming she’ll waken to swim through her ancestry, out to a platform
of years-old ice.
The ice will remember her immensity and the hunt. Ringed seals will rise
between thick floes. She is, after all, Ursus maritimus, the great white bear,
belonging to the land of the Shaman. Her spirit will return dressed as fur,
as shadow, as fog. For now, her dream suspends the thaw, rafts into mine.
fog horn echo
the coast lost
in mist
—
Barbara Sabol lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, Watermark: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023.) Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her forthcoming book, Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025.
