Colouring a Jaguar
By Andrea Ferrari Kristeller
April 15, 2024
April 15, 2024
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If you pierce the eye of the fish with a pin,
the second-grade girl told her friend, it will pop up as you remove the pin They were sprawling on the library floor colouring the spots of a jaguar cub the culmination of a special class on endangered animals But you could use a knife, her companion offered as greens and pinks filled the rounded roseate spots of the baby jaguar, taking turns with the silvery fuchsia. I interrupted, inquired, tried to explain how unnecessary it was to pierce the eye of a fish, even a dead fish They painted on in silence. Their two-storied pencil boxes held all the colours of a broken rainbow each of them tidily poised, sharpened I looked at them from a distance, the spots on the jaguar skin under their pointed colour pencils looking more and more like holes |
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Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, writer and naturalist. She loves her teaching practice and the rainforest. Her poems and short stories have been published by several different American, Canadian and British magazines. Her nouvelle “The Land Without You” received an Honourable Mention at the Writers of the Future contest (2018) and was published by the University of Misiones Press, in October 2023. Additionally, “The Land Without You and Other stories” was published on Amazon in June 2023, and its Spanish self-translated version, in September 2023. These books explore our relationship with the Atlantic rainforest, and its mysteries.
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Author's Note:
This poem retells a real-life experience I went through as a teacher last year. It was one of those moments that makes you doubt your career, and writing about it was a way of processing its implications. I will go on with environmental education now that I´ve just retired—perhaps even more so due to this moment.