SW Shorts Get Shorter & Revisiting A Bear of a Dog Poem

For those of you who have enjoyed our Friday Shorts segment, I have some baddish news. Please, both of you, have a seat. We’re going to be doing it a bit less. Maybe a lot less.

I had high hopes for SW Shorts, and I had dreams of many wonderful things we could do with it. But, like the feller said, I didn’t quite foller through on those schemes.

So, SW Shorts has a nice archive at your disposal. We will still sometimes post a story, poem, or song. We won’t be doing it every week. At least not for a while.

Everything else is proceeding as before, and we hope to be your allies for years to come. We will still post on Fostering Imagination, cultivating wonder, our heart-and-soul allies stuff, on Mondays. We’ll keep on helping you Discover Resources on Wednesdays (book reviews, etc.). We’ll still share Paul Boekell’s typographic art on Tuesdays (quotations over pretty pictures). We’ll still share The Warren & the World every Saturday morning, curated by Carolyn Clare Givens.

We want to do more, not less. And I still have some schemes, ambitious schemes I’d love to unleash on parents like you, brewing in my slightly-overworked mind. Who knows what the future holds?

I am sorry to have to pull back a bit on SW Shorts, but I’m genuinely excited about another year of sharing our hearts with you, about fostering imagination for kingdom anticipation, about being allies to you in the crucial work you do in your home and beyond.

We’re on your side!

Are you ever-so-slightly bummed? Well, why not enjoy this archival poem designed to encourage everyone who loves poems about dogs named Bear and bears named Dog?

It was illustrated by the bright and brilliant boy wonder Aedan Peterson, my personal friend with red hair.

Dog the Bear and Bear the Dog

by S.D. Smith, illustrated by Aedan Peterson

There once was a dog whose full name was “Bear,”
And a bear whose full name was “Dog,”
On one side of the forest, a log fell on Bear,
On the other, Dog fell on a log.

It might have been confusing, I know, I know,
But neither of them knew the other.
And poor Dog had only a brother, aged seven,
and Bear only had seven brothers.

Dog hibernated, as all bears will do,
And they wisely let sleeping Bear lie,
Bear chewed on bones, but Dog ate four people,
Thus Dog was unbearably wide.

If it seems too painful, to think of ole’ Dog,
Eating four people, then belching,
Know none were nice and all had once eaten,
Bear meat –and got second helpings!

Bear had himself, never eaten a man,
Though one said, “You smell like a skunk!”
He then kicked Bear, but Bear did not eat him,
Only chewed a quite generous chunk.

So, these two had had run-ins with humans,
And humans had run in to them,
But again, they had never, ever once met and,
That’s usually where stories begin.

It might begin with them shaking hands,
And hitting it off from the start,
But neither Bear, nor Dog, even had hands!
And Bear hated “shake” from the heart.

Once a railway man had taught Bear to “shake,”
To “roll over” and “play dead” for groups,
But that day on the train, when commanded, “Obey!”
Bear bit him upon on his caboose.

Dog, likewise, had quite a career,
He had once been a great circus bear.
But he drew the line and abandoned the job,
When they made him wear pink underwear!

So Dog was a bear and yes, Bear was a dog,
And Dog, the bear, could be scary,
But Bear the dog, wasn’t nearly as doggy,
As Dog was so splendidly beary.

If they ever met, but didn’t ever get to–
“My name is,” –to the point where you share it.
I think an oddness would dog Bear all his days,
And that Dog couldn’t possibly bear it.