Rubbersoled
dog invisible tags me
fugitive on empty street
sun keeps us in spidery web
my sequins caught in silk
his eight eyes unblinking
sombre harmonies of
sluggish sound
under high notes of
whistling wind
Gedichte zum Thema: dog
Gedichte zum Thema „dog“ auf Poets.by.
Learning to Walk
It's not that she hasn't been doing this all along:
She'd walked to school as yellow lozenges, oozing screams,
fumed past her along hot asphalt. She'd splashed the creek,
anxious for a path, then built it herself, kenning
to use her father's axe without lost blood.
She'd walked from Springer Mountain north, chatting in
her offhand way with bears, a big cat and a ghost.
She'd walked the halls of academia and then the hills,
big ones, bringing seedling trees to snug up to
the raw stumps of firs machines had eaten.
She'd walked to a job for decades, block after block
of homes with eyes of black glass inching
past her tired, angry shoes. Now, late in life,
she keeps a small dog bereft by her parents’
The Dog Tupman
Oh little friend of half my days,
My little friend, who followed me
Along those crooked sullen ways
That only you had eyes to see.
You felt the same. You understood
You too, defensive and morose,
Encloaked your secret puppyhood--
Your secret heart--and hid them close.
For I alone have seen you serve,
Disciple of those early springs,
With ears awry and tail a-curve
You lost yourself in puppy things.
And you saw me. You bore in mind
The clean and sunny things I felt
When, throwing hate along the wind,
I flashed the lantern at my belt.
A Day in Bed
I wish I had not got a cold,
The wind is big and wild,
I wish that I was very old,
Not just a little child.
Somehow the day is very long
Just keeping here, alone;
I do not like the big wind’s song,
He’s growling for a bone.
He’s like an awful dog we had
Who used to creep around
And snatch at things--he was so bad,
With just that horrid sound.
I’m sitting up and nurse has made
Me wear a woolly shawl;
I wish I was not so afraid;
It’s horrid to be small.
Epilogue
The barking of little dogs in the night is more remembered than
the shining of the stars:
Only those who watch for long may see the moon rise:
And they are mad ever after and go with blind eyes
Nosing hungrily in the gutter for the scraps that men throw to the dogs;
Few heed their babblings.
Solitude
When you have tidied all things for the night,
And while your thoughts are fading to their sleep,
You'll pause a moment in the late firelight,
Too sorrowful to weep.
The large and gentle furniture has stood
In sympathetic silence all the day
With that old kindness of domestic wood ;
Nevertheless the haunted room will say :
"Someone must be away."
The little dog rolls over half awake,
Stretches his paws, yawns, looking up at you,
Wags his tail very slightly for your sake,
That you may feel he is unhappy too.
A distant engine whistles, or the floor
Creaks, or the wandering night-wind bangs a door.
Silence is scattered like a broken glass.
Dog
O LITTLE friend, your nose is ready ; you sniff,
Asking for that expected walk,
(Your nostrils full of the happy rabbit-whiff)
And almost talk.
And so the moment becomes a moving force ;
Coats glide down from their pegs in the humble dark ;
You scamper the stairs,
Your body informed with the scent and the track and the mark
Of stoats and weasels, moles and badgers and hares.
We are going Out. You know the pitch of the word,
Probing the tone of thought as it comes through fog
And reaches by devious means (half-smelt, half-heard)
The four-legged brain of a walk-ecstatic dog.
Out through the garden your head is already low.
You are going your walk, you know,
And your limbs will draw
At Night
On moony nights the dogs bark shrill
Down the valley and up the hill.
There's one is angry to behold
The moon so unafraid and cold,
Who makes the earth as bright as day,
But yet unhappy, dead, and gray.
Another in his strawy lair
Says: "Who's a-howling over there?
By heavens I will stop him soon
From interfering with the moon."
So back he barks, with throat upthrown:
"You leave our moon, our moon alone."
And other distant dogs respond
Beyond the fields, beyond, beyond.
Andy the Night-Watch
In my Spanish cloak,
And old slouch hat,
And overshoes of felt,
And Tyke, my faithful dog,
And my knotted hickory cane,
I slipped about with a bull’s-eye lantern
From door to door on the square,
As the midnight stars wheeled round,
And the bell in the steeple murmured
From the blowing of the wind;
And the weary steps of old Doc Hill
Sounded like one who walks in sleep,
And a far-off rooster crew.
And now another is watching Spoon River
As others watched before me.
And here we lie, Doc Hill and I
Questionnaire
Have I told any man to be a liar for my sake?
Have I sold ice to the poor in summer and coal to the
poor in winter for the sake of daughters who nursed
brindle bull terriers and led with a leash their dogs
clothed in plaid wool jackets?
Have I given any man an earful too much of my talk —
or asked any man to take a snootful of booze on
my account?
Have I put wool in my own ears when men tried to tell
me what was good for me? Have I been a bum
listener ?
Have I taken dollars from the living and the unborn
while I made speeches on the retributions that
shadow the heels of the dishonest?
Have I done any good under cover? Or have I always
put it in the show windows and the newspapers ?
Chains
I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,
But mostly the one man poised on a drill
Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him
White in the frosty air,
Where the lordly house would stand.
Majestic, muscular, high like a god,
He stood,
And controlled and stopped
And started his thundering drill,
Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,
Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,
Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.
Then out of a nearby house came a youth,
All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,
Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,
Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.
Fool's Money Bags
Outside the long window,
With his head on the stone sill,
The dog is lying,
Gazing at his Beloved.
His eyes are wet and urgent,
And his body is taut and shaking.
It is cold on the terrace;
A pale wind licks along the stone slabs,
But the dog gazes through the glass
And is content.
The Beloved is writing a letter.
Occasionally she speaks to the dog,
But she is thinking of her writing.
Does she, too, give her devotion to one
Not worthy?