the dog bite

April is National Poetry month. Some people write a poem a day for thirty days. Not me. I'll stick with at least one per week to post on Fridays as usual, and I'll write them when they come to me. (I am also trying to write somewhat regularly on tiny river splash, too). The Big Tent Poetry prompt this week was actually seven prompts, for those who might be doing a poem a day. I picked just one: write about being afraid of an animal. What resulted is a sort of a haibun, with prose followed by a short poem.

The dog bite

Some element of the dream was the same every time. She would be walking, and a dog would approach, and she would try not to show her fear, because she knew her fear would be felt by the animal and it would surely bite her. Despite all attempts to stay calm, to appease the malice, she knew it would bite through her hand – and she would wake up with a pounding heart at the moment the powerful incisors would puncture, with the strong jaw clamping down. Another time, riding her bike, the dog would chase her, and catch her, and of course, bite through her hand, pulling and stretching the skin away from her arm as she peddled away, as if it were taffy. That one was a large collie. Other times it was a German shepherd or a Doberman. They were big, vicious dogs. She would wake up, mostly at the moment of the bite, but sometimes just before. The strange thing is, in her waking life, she had never been bitten by a dog, and she really loved friendly dogs. Who could explain more than 30 years of an intermittent, recurring nightmare that seemed to have no basis? She found out, as she neared 40, that her great grandmother had been bitten badly by a dog when she was young. She didn't know if it was a bite through her hand, but she suspects it was. Can fear or memory be retained in the DNA and passed down to a future generation?

Great-grandmother Clorinda

prayed on her rosary beads.

She had seen her share of bad things,

and prayed for a peaceful death.

Copyright © 2011 Nan P.