Day 17: Animals

Choose an animal. Write a poem where you describe the animal in an unusual way. Or, write a poem where you become the animal. One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, has a million amazing animal poems.

Honey at the Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

~Mary Oliver


And though they are not usually postcard length, I am also a sucker for Elizabeth Bishop's animal encounters. Here's one I love about a moose.