GREETING THE HUNGRY BEAR IN AUTUMN by Lorraine Cregar

GREETING THE HUNGRY BEAR IN AUTUMN by Lorraine Cregar

For Mary Oliver

Oh, Mary, did you walk through the door with curiosity and wonder when the hungry bear came for you last winter?

Death scares me, at best dumping me into hell for sins an all-forgiving God couldn’t forgive, at worst permanently eradicating me forever, no thought, no self.

My mother has faith in a heaven, where she will reunite with my father, and her sister, who died a painful death from leukemia as a child, now grown into a woman.

I have prayed long and deep for someone – God, my dead father, now you – to come to me, to show me the glory that supposedly exists after this life.

I have spoken with priests and pastors, members of different faiths, all proclaiming there is a heaven, paradise, nirvana, reincarnation once this life ends.

I have read about those faiths, and their claims that they worship the powerful, all knowing being who created this world.

And how they use ancient texts as proof that they – Catholic, Jew, Muslim – are better than all others as justification for extinguishing the others’ light.

I’m told I must believe, believing is righteous, and believing is its own way of knowing there’s another life after this one.

But each day feels like a countdown to oblivion, to a time when there is no time, when I no longer exist, not here, not there.

Oh, Mary, I fear I will not be as gracious as you when the hungry bear takes the coins from his purse to buy me.

Lorraine Cregar is a poet and novelist. Her poetry has been published in The Writers Circle Journal, The New Jersey Bards Poetry Review 2023, The Ravens Perch, and Well Read Magazine. She is writing her first novel, Jackson Street Books, and her first poetry chapbook about life and cats. Lorraine lives with her husband, Mark, and their four cats in Chester, N.J.