One Flesh, One Fur

Boy oh Bear, how we hugged and tumbled!

Such romp and tumult under the covers!

Such escapades in inner space!

Our cosmic cousins leapt alive at our call:

we had big Mr Bear and the sky-striding Hunter

rampaging - the scariness thrilled us to bits!

And there, in the clench of our fierce embrace,

was the pounding, pounding of a best friend’s blood

and the passion of a sewn-up sigh.

So I screamed for us both when I found your wound,

that precious blood flaring between my fingers

and all things ablaze with its fountain and fire.

(It hung so profuse in the holly grove

that every shock of the axe hurled

a crimson cataract at earth’s dry bone.)

So where are you now?

What became of love of a battered teddy bear,

whose holes and patches, straw and sawdust –

stardust – moved a childish heart?

Yes, what made bear-love loneliness?

What wrenched you from me, crowned with tears,

and flung you dreadful dark-years?

I dream of you, see you with streaming hair;

but my plundered hands are an empty womb,

an empty tomb, a disconsolate prayer:

Dear Lord of the Feast, my cup runs dry;

I thirst, I thirst for the crush of our bear-hug,

your G force distilled in young love’s chalice, over-

flowing with stars. In these wilderness years

I am parched to the bone: my Lord, I crave

your giddy sweat, your love divine.

If you've found the poem of interest you may like to read the essay below,

which details its gradual shaping over many years.

The Child is Father of the Man

What’s it like to complete a poem after working on it for 52 years? I must be one of the very few people in human history who can answer that question. I certainly have a sense of fulfilment, enhanced by the fact that now, at last, I can tell the story of the poem’s slow development.

To understand how it all began you must add another ten years – and a battered teddy bear. I loved my teddy but there came a night when I went to bed without him because my mother felt it was ‘time to grow up.’ With teddy no longer clutched in my arms, our imaginary bedtime adventures became a thing of the past. Teddy sat in a distant chair either dying or dead.

In my teens I declared that I wanted to be an Anglican priest. This may have been partly genuine but it was also a way to annoy my anti-clerical parents! I didn’t go far down the priestly road but I did embrace Christianity, and my view of those fantasy romps with teddy became heavy with undigested faith. I enshrined it in a poem whose solemn tread of four-beat lines reflected the Rupert Bear books (bears again!) which had complemented my bear-loving childhood.

The opening verses display an unhappy mix of hubris and Christology:

Jesus Bear was cosmonaut

In cosy chaos, long ago.

Ex nihilo, I set us there

to tumble headlong through the night.

I probed his wounds to penetrate –

my loving hands –

the bigness of a human soul,

the sweep of universal might.

A few verses later, the poem ends crudely, with childhood magic and teenage earnestness driven out by filial grouch:

What … turned bear-love into loneliness?

… mother who, when I was older,

told me not to play with dolls.

This was an unprepossessing start to the writing career I later pursued. My books included children’s history, children’s fiction and materials for overseas learners of English. One of my greatest joys was translating The Book of Margery Kempe from Kempe’s Middle English.

Her Book is an autobiography and also a variety show. In it, we see Kempe rolling in the dirt both literally and metaphorically; yet her religious transports carry her to Heaven, where she becomes God’s bride, to the Nativity, where she ‘made Our Lady a nice hot drink’, and to Calvary to see the Crucifixion in all its raw brutality.

Scenes such as these filled Kempe’s receptive mind throughout her adult life. By contrast, my own inner life had been inhibited by the time I was only six or seven. I could blame the big, bad adult world for teddy’s demise but I’d marked my coming of age

with a poem that endorsed what had happened. I'd buried teddy under reach-me-down theology and colossal presumption.

In place of my youthful ‘Ex nihilo, I set us there’ I wanted to say with William Wordsworth ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’ – and to cherish the hope that it might remain. Recasting my poem took decades. Eventually, though, the syllables started dancing in threes instead of plodding in twos, and threesomes replaced the earlier four-square grouping of lines.

As the verse comes to life, so does the bear. No longer passive, he is fully engaged in the whole adventure, and the first four verses see him as successively playmate, fellow adventurer, lover and dying hero. Writing in my maturity, I’d clearly found sufficient creativity to over-correct the bloodless account of the earlier version. I exaggerate and idealise, with notions and insights far beyond the reach of a child.

My fifth verse sees the bear – I will now say Christ – as redeemer. For a moment we are at ‘the still point of the turning world’ – before the poem’s remaining verses express an anguished yearning for the closeness to God which sometimes blessed my early years.

Gone is the easy answer about insensitive parenting! The poem seeks a better answer but fails to find one. Gone, too, is the total desolation. ‘Now all is lost’ said the earlier poem – disconsolate, bleak and impersonal – while the later one has ‘where are you now?’ and cries to the Lord in passionate hope.

There is comfort, then. To have such a craving shows that something remains. Moreover, in writing the poem’s opening verses I’ve conjured up, in embellished form, the very childlife the later verses seek in vain. I’ve always liked a paradox!

My adventures with teddy had their own unique content but every child dreams, and almost every child ceases to dream! This poignant fact has baffled me for 50-odd years, and I do my best to foster and celebrate children’s creativity. I run what I rather grandly call The Worldwide Song Project, a small ‘good cause’ that links children’s poems and children’s music and spans the oceans with friendship and song.

The Project has a nativity play called The Travellers’ Delight. I wrote it as a vehicle for Christmas songs by young composers and – surprisingly – it brings us back to the subject of bears. To illustrate this, let me quote a couple of lines at random:

Think of it, God being born as we speak,

God on this filthy earth small and weak.

There is nothing ostensibly ursine in my choice of simple, rhyming couplets - they make learning easy. However, I realised after completing the play that I’d gone right back to the verse-form of my Rupert books. A lifetime spent in relaxing its hold had been swept aside. Truly, then, the child is father of the man!

Tony D Triggs

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