Once upon a time, on a farm far far away, lived Peter the Pig. While his friends were out playing in the manure and the mud, Peter would sit in the corner of the pen, composing his next masterpiece using nothing more than a dirty stick and a piece of crumbling birch bark.
Peter wrote down everything he saw. He wrote down the feel of the mud between his toes. He wrote down the things he smelled with his nose – the mud, the breeze, the grass, the trees – Peter wrote down it all. He described everything he saw - the chicken and the crow and how they moved just so. Peter wrote it all down for prosperity, even though he didn't want anyone to see, see what he'd written in the corner of the pen, sitting all serenely, all quiet and zen.
But then one day, Peter's writing corner was disturbed by a Bull who was most perturbed. The Bull snorted and snuffed, he stamped and huffed. He glared at Peter and then stomped towards him.
"What are you doing over there?" the Bull asked Peter with a curious stare.
"Why, I'm writing," Peter said, looking up over his page, wondering why the bull was in such a rage. "Writing…," said the Bull. "What's writing?"
"Hmmm," Peter said. He had never thought that the farm animals may not know what writing was or what it meant to be a poet.
"Well, writing is when you make certain marks on paper that mean things, like a picture of the words we say out loud," Peter said. "Here let me show you… This here is the letter "A" and this is how you make a "B"…"
The Bull sat down beside Peter, looking very closely as Peter pointed to the strange markings.
"A…" the Bull repeated.
Peter smiled, offering his stick and bark to the Bull. "Would like to try?" Peter asked.
The Bull looked from Peter to the stick and bark. He extended his hoof, gingerly taking hold of the stick. And the Bull began to write.
"That's right, " Peter said. "First, you put a line here, and then you move the stick down this way, and then you move this way."
The Bull did just as Peter instructed. He stopped to look over his creation.
"A…" the Bull said, smiling. Then he looked at Peter and then looked down at the ground. "Can you teach me more?" the Bull asked.
"Why, yes, of course," Peter said.
So day after day, it went this way, with Peter teaching the Bull the alphabet. Soon, the Bull could not only read small words, but he could write short sentences as well.
One day, the Bull decided he wanted to write a poem.
"How do you write a poem?" the Bull asked Peter.
"Well, you just write what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you touch," Peter said. "A poem can rhyme, but it doesn't have to."
The Bull gave it a try. He used his own stick and wrote in the mud. He wrote and wrote, it seemed like forever that he wrote. And then the Bull put the stick down and looked up.
"Would you like to read it?" the Bull asked Peter.
Peter smiled. "Yes, I would," he said.
He looked down at what the Bull had written:
Down in the mud, I learned to write,
with the wind blowing and the sun bright.
A poet pig, an unlikely friend,
became my teacher, in the end.
Peter looked up at the Bull and smiled. The Bull smiled back.
"That is a very good beginning," Peter said. "But we are not done yet…There's still limericks and haiku's and…"
Peter and the Bull walked back towards the farm house, arm in arm. They were unlikely friends, indeed.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, Angela Dawn MacKay
