TOGETHER AGAIN: THE LION AND THE LAMB

Pronghorn antelope
fear extinction
along the four-lanes
of barren Wyoming hills.
Hunters aim for them in flight.
And with the little cover to escape,
they fall in crisscrossed heaps.
Thanks to the antelope,
wildlife conservation
seeks to preserve the past.
Expo 74 used as its theme
"Preserve the Environment"
to create a consciousness
for endangered species.
There, I felt the evils
of domestication
and feared the extinction
of my own species.
Cradled by the horns
of the antelope,
I ride tomorrow in a vision
of buffalo and hawk
returning to reclaim their land,
their berries and wild grain.
I lie down with nature's finest
lulled to sleep by spirits of the past
returned from sunken graves
as nameless stones stand upright
in forgotten space
to watch me pen these words.

© Harding Stedler


Commentary:

In conducting a writers' workshop a couple years ago, I taped on several index cards two randomly-paired postage stamps. Without seeing what the pairings were, the participants each drew a card. They were to write a poem linking the subject matter of the two stamps.

During my years of teaching, I was keenly aware that a primary task of mine was to get students to think critically. That meant, in part, recognizing relationships between and among things. Since writing is thinking recorded, I often had students approach writing from the standpoint of bringing disparate items--objects, events, whatever--together into some kind of relationship.

At any writers' workshop I conduct, I am also a participant. The stamps I had to work with were a 3-cent stamp celebrating the preservation of the pronghorn antelope and a ten-cent stamp honoring the theme of Expo '74, "Preserving the Environment." This poem was the result of that exercise.

I wrote the poem sitting on a fallen log in an abandoned cemetery dating back to the days of the Northwest Territory, before Ohio became a state. The gravestones were plain, and most of the graves badly sunken.

Harding Stedler
Bonfire contributor