Poem: "What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog or What His Daddy Said To Him that Day," by David Lee, from A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems, © Copper Canyon Press.

What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog
or
What His Daddy Said To Him that Day


Son
let me tell you the story
of the man who saved
a baby grizzly bear
from a forest fire
and brought it home
nursed it
fed it
kept it like his own
And how the last thing
that man ever learned on earth
when it grown up
and he tried to keep it
out of the hog pen one morning
was the lesson
of what a grizzly bear
is at last
And it had
a final exam
he couldn't help
but pass

from "The Writer's Almanac" for 09/05/05 by Garrison Keillor.