Poetry About Bears

Bear poetry celebrates one of nature's most iconic creatures - powerful yet protective, fierce yet nurturing, symbols of wilderness that remind us of worlds beyond human control. These verses explore the majesty of bears in their natural habitats, the awe they inspire, and the complex relationship between humans and these magnificent animals that share our forests and mountains.

From grizzly mothers teaching cubs to fish to polar bears navigating melting ice, from the symbolism of hibernation and renewal to encounters that remind us we're not always at the top of the food chain, poetry about bears honors both the actual animal and what it represents: wildness, instinct, resilience, and the natural world's enduring power.

Featured Poems

Grizzly Mother

Observing a bear family fishing in an Alaskan river.

She stands shoulder-deep in rushing water, patience incarnate, teaching her cubs the ancient art of survival.

One swipe - silver salmon arcing through sunlit spray, pinned to river stones by claws that could tear me apart but are used now for feeding her young.

From my safe distance, camera clicking, I witness motherhood in its most primal form: fierce protection, patient instruction, the passing down of knowledge that predates all human civilization.

She looks up once, meets my eyes across fifty yards of water, and I understand: this river is hers, these mountains are hers, I am the visitor in her kingdom.

- Thomas Everett

Polar Bear, Melting World

A meditation on climate change through the eyes of Arctic bears.

The ice sheet shrinks year by year, and the polar bear swims farther between hunting grounds, burns precious calories covering distances that used to be solid beneath her paws.

She was built for this - for ice and seal and snow, for a frozen world that's disappearing beneath her.

Scientists track her with satellite collars, document her declining body mass, the rising cub mortality, but she knows nothing of politics or conferences or carbon emissions.

She knows only that hunting is harder, that the ice breaks earlier, that the world her mother taught her to navigate no longer exists.

She is evolution outpaced by change, a living testimony to what we're losing.

- Astrid Hansen

Bear Medicine

Drawing on Indigenous teachings about the bear as symbol and teacher.

The elders say Bear is the keeper of the dream lodge, the teacher of introspection, showing us that sometimes strength means going within, going dark, going quiet.

In winter, Bear sleeps - not dead but transformed, heart rate slowed to nearly nothing, living off stored reserves, trusting in the wisdom of temporary withdrawal from the world.

This is Bear medicine: knowing when to fight and when to retreat, knowing when to roar and when to rest, understanding that survival sometimes means surrendering to the season, trusting spring will come again.

We've forgotten this - we humans who think we must always be producing, achieving, going - but Bear remembers, and if we're quiet enough, Bear will teach us.

- Sage Blackfoot

Classic Voices

The Bear

by Galway Kinnell (1968)

Kinnell's visceral poem about tracking and becoming one with a bear, exploring primal connection to nature and the cycle of predator and prey.

In the late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close to see the warm and shining of a bears den

The Bear on the Delhi Road

by Earle Birney (1952)

Birney's poem about a performing bear in India, contrasting wildness with captivity and exploitation.

Unreal, tall as a myth by the road the Himalayan bear is beating the brilliant air with his crooked arms.

About him two men, bare, spindly as locusts, leap.

Micro Verses

In the bear's eyes, I see wilderness that refuses to be tamed.

- John Muir

The bear does not seek our approval. It simply is - perfectly, wildly itself.

- Nature wisdom

Hibernation is not laziness - it's wisdom, knowing when to rest to survive the season.

- Bear teaching

Meet a bear on the trail, and remember: you are not the apex predator you thought you were.

- Wilderness lesson

Deeper Explorations

Bears & Wilderness

The bear as symbol and untamed nature and wild spaces.

Yellowstone Morning

Through binoculars, I watch a black bear turn over rocks looking for grubs, utterly unconcerned with the traffic jam of tourists it's created.

This is true wildness: living according to hunger, season, instinct - not performing for cameras but simply being bear, doing what bears do, while we watch from our metal boxes, envying its freedom.

- Rachel Stone

Cave Paintings

Our ancestors painted bears on cave walls 35,000 years ago - honored them as gods, feared them as enemies, recognized in them a power we did not possess.

We still paint them, photograph them, write poems about them, because they represent something we've lost: the wild we can never fully reclaim.

- Marie Dubois

Bears & Survival

What bears teach us about resilience and adaptation.

The Bear's Calendar

The bear knows: time for fattening, time for sleeping, time for waking, time for teaching cubs.

No clocks needed, no appointments kept - just the ancient rhythm of seasons in the blood, the wisdom of cycles we've forgotten in our year-round fluorescent living.

- Chen Wei

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