Our canine companions Heidi and Mili
In moving through life everyday there are events that move us emotionally. For the writer, there are vehicles of expression that offer us release and celebration.
My wife Pat and I have enjoyed the companionship of dogs for most of our lives. We begin each morning in our sunroom with a coffee klatch that includes our two dogs—Mili, a Tibetan spaniel, and Heidi, a mountain feist—who find their way to our laps. Mili came from our Humane Society and was saved from third-stage heartworms, and Heidi is a strayed and stayed who arrived at our door pregnant with what soon became five puppies.
Prior to Mili and Heidi, we had Angel, another Humane Society shelter adoption. Angel was a black border collie mix who was our constant companion at work or leisure for 14 years. In our front yard garden there is a granite memorial headstone and a black wooden silhouette of her that has her former collar around its neck.
I share this emotional attachment to our own dogs in order to explain why I was so moved by a totally unexpected event while visiting a close friend at her veterinary clinic. Unable to contain what I had witnessed and felt, I wrote this poem.
Old Samoyed Whose Name I Did Not Know
I did not expect to put you down
Old Samoyed whose name I did not know.
You lay on the treatment table
As I came through the clinic’s back door,
And my veterinary friend looked up
To explain that she had just put you to sleep.
I assumed she meant preparation for surgery
Because your thick white fur seemed so alive,
But then I saw the assistant approach
With a solemn expression and the brown plastic bags.
Your head was massive and expressionless.
You were immaculate, obviously loved,
But soon to disappear to light
As they bowed your muzzle, subdued your bushy tail,
And made an unstable package of you
With the dark wrinkled bags and coarse hemp twine.
I was asked to bear your hundred-pound weight
At one end of an unpainted plywood board,
And we shuffled with you to the bed of a pick-up truck
And followed your masters to your affluent home.
I supported you again to the far back yard
Where your master removed the sod
And made shovel prints in the Tennessee clay
That became slick gray murals swirled with red oxides.
He dug the hole, spading the earth
And breaking its back on the accumulating pile.
Not long or wide enough for a man,
A baby’s grave, dug deep in the memory of the soil.
You were nine, he said, the best dog
That they had ever had, and we continued
To measure your life against the hole to put you down.
Me, a stranger to your joys, bore witness
To your strength and beauty seconds after death.
Your masters grieve, and yet they have memories
Of you while I grieve who never saw you run,
Who arrived only in time to put you down,
Old Samoyed whose name I did not know.
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