Catherine Pierce

Baste the Bear

(with lines from The Boy’s Own Book, by William Clarke, 1829)

In this game, the bear is a boy
who sits on a stone. A rope

wraps his waist; at the end
is his keeper. The other boys

strike the bear with handkerchiefs
and the keeper must tag them

without letting go the rope
or unseating the boy. The player

so touched takes the place of the bear.
A fact about handkerchiefs

is that they’re alchemical: lily-soft
when open, cudgeled when knotted

and flung. The boys know by now
that magic is a child’s confection,

but here is a kind they can trust.
The small welts rise as evidence.

Again and again the boys strike.
When finally the bear is freed,

his relief makes him merciless.
He flings his white whip

at the new bear. The sun sinks
and rinses the yard red

and the boys play on and on.
Being bear once, or even oftener,

does not exonerate a player,
if fairly touched, from becoming so again.

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Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); her new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming in October 2020. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.