A DACHSHUND’S OTHER LOVE

A DACHSHUND’S OTHER LOVE

One day I left home of my doghood, taken to a woods real from my dreams

By a person not my mistress, having a cat falling apart at her seams!

I sniffed for a long time for familiar odors of family beloved taken from me

Soon I lay on a new blanket provided by this lady who was kind as could be!

We’d run by roadways together. Smelling, snorting in woods was fun

But the ache in my long body returns when I am chained in a shed with no sun

Her car engines roar…then grows silent, even that black cat would look good to me

Stillness rests in woods I could run in, inside emptiness I’ve grown to be

Where are kind hands that held me, circled arms, shape of her dear face?

A dogged heart here in my long body hurts for my home as my own place

One day my eyes looked out a window, dense woods I ran in was no more

I am brought to a house bigger than bigger, a man and his wife open a door

Warm hands again reach out to me slowly, gentle hands place me on wood floor

Leafed woods once large, become a carpet. Love, once taken, replaces some more

There is laughter, children, new family, much like endeared ones I knew

My four feet now on carpet placed lightly, my black nose much sniffing to do

Changes for people remain ever changing, my small brown head tends to nod

My heart again filling up with something, must be love, through people, from God

To grow means for people an expanding. For me…I’ll just remain short and long

My own ensign, my own sign and token, floppy ears hear a new love song

For Marie, Jack and family

Poem by Imelda Dickinson, October 11, 1982
www.ImeldaDickinson.com