Now I didn't get this picture in the wild. It is a stuffed bear in a sporting goods store near my house, Cabellas. It's actually a Kodiak bear. They stand 10 to 11 feet tall. Wouldn't want to run across one in the wild, either. Its image inspired this poem, as I pondered how it might have died. Which brought me to the bar in Alaska, were this old Irish logger spins his tale.

Ahoyo - an Alaskan term that means "Listen up," believed to be an Inuit interpretative of the nautical term "Ahoy."
Counterpoise - a factor or force that balances or neutralizes another. Having an opposing and balancing effect.
Bruin - Bear
Nor'easter - a strong storm blown in from the northeast of the Atlantic on the eastern coast of North America.
Carnivorous - meat eating
Countervail - offset, counter something with equal force.
Epithet - an adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of a person. Here it would be "dead" or "the late."

This poem is a Droighneach.
Droighneach (dra'iy-nach) an Irish form, is sometimes referred to as "the thorny" because of the degree of difficulty in writing this Gaelic Verse Form that employs cross rhyme and requires 3 syllable end words. It is a traditional Irish quatrain stanza of 9-to-13-syllable lines alternately rhymed (abab), always on 3-syllable words, with at least two cross-rimes linking the pair of lines in each half and involving those lines' end-words, plus alliteration in every line, usually between the end-word and the preceding stressed (always the case for a quatrain) last line. Being Irish, it also requires the dunedh, meaning it should end where it began (opening word, or phrase, or line, repeated at the end).

So again, the elements of the Droighneach are:
-a loose stanzaic form usually written with any number of octaves but it could be quatrains.
-syllabic each line with 9 to 13 syllables.
-terminated, written with 3 syllable end words.
-rhymed, with alternating end rhyme abab cdcd etc.
-composed with cross rhyme. There are at least two cross-rhymes in each couplet
-and alliteration in each line;
-written with the defining features of most Celtic poems, cywddydd (harmony of sound) and dunadh (beginning and ending the poem with the same word, phrase or line.). It charts something like this, where the x's represent syllables, the letters show rhymes, and the parens show the 3 syllable words.

(x x d) b x x x (x x a)
x x x x a x x x (x x b)
x x x x x b (x x a)
x x x x a x x (x x b)
x x x x x d x x (x x c)
x x x c x x x x x x (x x d)
x x d x x x x x x (x x c)
x x x x c x (d x d)
Pretty complex, huh! Hope I got it right

I added a touch of a dialect, and made in first person.

This photograph was taken by author himself on October 12, 2017.

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