Mark posting his favourite poem made me think of mine, so I'm posting
it in case anyone else would like it. It's by an English poet called
Simon Armitage, and here's a bit of blurb first from an interview
with him about the poem.
Sarah
SIMON ARMITAGE: This poem goes back to the time when I owned a dog
and there'd never really been a dog in the family before and when I
got this thing I wasn't sure what to do with it. And it was okay to
begin with and then it sort of discovered that it owned teeth and
that I owned furniture and these two things came together very
expensively so I started writing lots of poems about how you could
get rid of a dog in the middle of the night without anybody knowing.
That's the anecdotal side.
On a theoretical level I wanted to write a poem about things that dog
you all your life, things that track you, tail you, haunt you - and
there were some domestic circumstances in my life to which this poem
is appropriate - but they're hidden and concealed within the poem.
BEFORE YOU CUT LOOSE
Before you cut loose,
put dogs on the list
of difficult things to lose. Those dogs ditched
on the North York Moors or the Sussex Downs
or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars
have followed their noses to market towns
and bounced like balls into their owners' arms.
I heard one story of a dog that swam
to the English coast from the Isle of Man,
and a dog that carried eggs and bacon
and a morning paper from the village
surfaced umpteen leagues and two years later,
bacon eaten but the eggs unbroken,
newsprint dry as tinder, to the letter.
A dog might wander the width of the map
to bury its head in its owner's lap,
crawl the last mile to dab a bleeding paw
against its own front door. To die at home,
a dog might walk its four legs to the bone.
You can take off the tag and the collar
but a dog wears one coat and one colour.
A dog got rid of - that's a dog for life.
No dog howls like a dog kicked out at night.
Try looking a dog like that in the eye.
