We promise to keep this thing to an hour.
This is a new poem.
And it's out of season.
It's called Elizabeth's War With the Christmas Bear.
It's about something that's interesting.
Not exactly pretty.
My account is inaccurate account of bear
baiting in the 16th century.
And the Elizabeth is Elizabeth I.
It was a very popular sport with her
when plague was in the city.
She'd go out in the country and have a bear baiting
and feel better.
Now, it depressed her, people were dying in.
Elizabeth's war with the Christmas bear 1593.
The Bears are kept by hundreds within fences
are fed cracked eggs.
The weakest are slaughtered and fed to the others
after being scented with the blood of deer
brought to the pastures by Elizabeth's men.
The blood spills from deep pails with bottoms of slate.
The balding queen had bear gardens
in London and in the country.
The bear is baited.
The nostrils are blown full with pepper.
The Irish Wolfhounds are starved.
Then emptied made crazy with fermented barley.
And the bear's hind leg is chained to a stake.
The bear is blinded and whipped kneeling in his own blood
and slaver.
He is almost instantly worried by the dogs.
At the very moment, that Elizabeth took Essex's head.
A giant brown bear stood in the gardens
with dogs hanging from his fur.
He took away the son, took a wolfhound in his mouth,
and tossed it into the white lap of Elizabeth I. Arrows
and staves rained on his chest.
And standing, he then stood even taller.
Seeing into the Queen's private boxes,
he grinned into her battered eggshell face.
Another volley of arrows and poles.
And opening his mouth, he showered blood
all over Elizabeth and her Privy Council.
The very next evening, a cool evening, the queen
demanded 13 bears and the justice of 113 dogs.
She slept all that Sunday night and much of the next morning.
Some said, she was guilty of this and that.
The Protestant queen gave the defeated bear
a grave in a Catholic cemetery.
The marker said, Peter, a solstice bear, a gift
of the Tsarevitch to Elizabeth.
After a long winter, she had the grave opened.
The bear skeleton was cleared with lye.
She placed it at her bedside, put a candle inside
behind the sockets of the eyes.
And then she spoke to it.
You were a Christmas bear.
Behind your eyes, I see the walls
of a snow cave, where you are a cub still smelling
of your mother's blood, which is dried in your hair.
You have troubled a queen, who is afraid
when seated in shade, which standing you had created.
A queen who often wakes with a dream of you at night.
Now, you'll stand by my bed and your long white bones alone.
You will frighten away at night all visions of bear.
And all day, you will be in this cold room.
Your constant grin.
You'll stand in the long white prodigy of your bones.
And you are every inch of you, a terrible vision
not bear, but virgin.
You discovered that I liked the old girl after all, right?
She's only playing men's games.