20 July 2009 – 27 January 2021
Goodnight, sweet prince. My beautiful, beloved boy. Warm, affectionate, gorgeous and brave to the very end. What a dog he was. Utterly irreplaceable, and so deeply adored.
Viggo.
Month: January 2021
Too close for comfort
There is no right time.
Definitely no good time.
Whenever it comes
We will look back with regret
Wish we had done things differently
And moreover, never had to.
But the moment has always been there –
Buried in the small print
Of the pact we entered into
All those years ago
Never once imagining
We’d ever have to live it.
Having had a heart murmur for a number of years, our beloved whippet is now in congestive heart failure. No longer a case of if but when we will need to make A Decision, and probably sooner rather than later. I know there are many bigger, and far worse things happening in the world now: it’s still hard. Dogs are wonderful, but they do put you through it sometimes.
Misdirection
We do not write poems about dogs –
Not, at least, if we want to be taken
In any way seriously.
Dogs are not sensible, grown-up subjects
For sensible, grown-up writers.
They are not issues or arguments
But the stuff of rhymes we write at school
Like sunsets, springtime and the sea
The root of all doggerel.
No. Instead, we stick to abstractions
Write loftily of love, fidelity, domestic intimacy,
Age, infirmity, and the bitter, plunging agony of leaving
While carefully kidding ourselves
That we’re not really writing
About dogs at all.
Sonnet #1
Another day dawns grey in Brexit-land.
The red tape piling up like rotten snow
That chokes and slows the flow of daily life;
Doors close, shelves empty, phones no longer ring.
And still the lies from those who won it all;
Insouciant, delusional and glib
They prate their nonsense to the credulous
And never own the chaos they unleashed.
We warned of this, we millions you ignored,
Denounced as traitors, told to suck it up;
We did not wish disaster on our land
And take no pleasure in our being right.
Reality is biting. Far too late
To save us from this self-inflicted fate.
Gonecycling (again) 