A Dog’s Life

I am a private person, so I am inviting you in to my life today – just a portion of it, inviting you to meet Digger, my hound, companion, walkmate.  I don’t know whether he knows – I suspect he does – just how important he is to how well I live. By nature solitary and lazy, I am unlikely to don outerwear and walk around the local park twice a day, meeting on the way a host of canine friends and their owners, in turn funny, sad, friendly, caring and occasionally hostile. Digger has replaced the role of the playground, my erstwhile opportunity to converse and exchange with people who become more than acquaintance, make up a community. So in celebration of our canine friends everywhere I offer up my poem.  How very daring of me!!

A Dog’s Life

Although  dog is bored,

dog does not complain.

An occasional sigh, expulsion

of disgruntled breath.

I tell him I’m bored too,

but not enough to fetch his lead.

He settles for a rub and a tickle

or two. I like his composure.

‘Pleasure is the absence of pain’  I tell him,

and comma-like, his presence comforts me.

 

He has accepted me, after abandonment.

Has stories I will never hear, a life

lived without and before us. We are not

so dissimilar then. New lives constructed

when the disappointments and the blows

bring down the here and nows.

 

He shows how it is possible, to decide

to continue. To re-emerge, perhaps

never to see the world the same again.

The walks, though unfamiliar , unnerving

still contain smells too exciting to ignore.

 

Advertisement