Initially, all of god’s creatures roamed the land as immortals.
The bears clawed and belched along happily for a good sixty years.
But aging was something God hadn’t planned for.
Forty years in, the foot pads desiccated.
The teeth cracked on salmon bone,
and the poor bears lived in perpetual hunger.
Hunger was also never part of God’s plan,
but mix-ups happen in the confection
of miracles, just as they would in any cake
where everything depends on the frosting.
Eventually the hearts stopped working,
and the brains went rotten.
But something divine rolled the bones around
in the gray meat, and kept dark sounds
pumping out the muzzles.
The hardest part of any job is staring your failures in the face.
It’s to hold yourself accountable. In such reverie, inflamed by guilt
He never asked for, a dirty bulb popped up over God’s head.
He came up with the idea of Death.
It was an effective, if harsh, way to smash back
to mud the little figurines He’d made
without understanding how in Them
suffering compounds naturally—it’s just part of time passing.
Not the only solution, probably. But the one being offered.
Death came from out God’s nostrils—a sealed, pinched smile
symbolizing his newfound cool.
Where the winds went, they forced the crops
to the earth, withered and white.
White as this new thing in the sky,
cold and bulky but graceful.
The bear takes the flakes into his lungs—
which is all that’s left to see of the bear.
Look through the lungs. Holy.
Like stained glass finally trapped the light.
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