A Dog's Loyalty



He was someone else’s dog
that probably liked to wander off
but still he was my mate.

Daily he pushed his shiny nose
under the lit of the front door’s letter box
rattling to ask me out for a walk.

Never did I have to look at the clock
and long for him to come again.
Each school day he was just there
with all his sweet dog’s loyalty
exclusively reserved for me.

Sometimes I found him at school,
more than five miles away from home.
Solicitously he had sneaked his way in
and stealthy crawled under my chair.
Once discovered, he had to go
he knew and took off with his head held low
to be back rattling at the front door after four.

One day his happy rattle lacked
and it has never returned
but Blacky still stays in my heart
the place for which he yearned
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Submitted by ludy_b on October 23, 2021

Modified by ludy_b on October 20, 2022

49 sec read
120

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXX XXX XXABB XXXACCX XDXD
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 769
Words 164
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 3, 3, 5, 7, 4

Ludy Bührs

The topics she writes about are very diverse, so are the poetry styles she applies. As a Dutch translator and poet, having lived in Cambodia's capital city Phnom Penh for 2.5 years, in 2008 she published "Op de ruïnes van een rijk" (On the Ruins of an Empire) ISBN 978-90-8834-483-1 with 60 poems based on her experiences there. In 2007 she received a Certificate of Accomplishment as one of The Best Poems and Poets of 2007 issued by poetry.com and the International Library of Poetry for her poem Choked Truth, her own translation of "Verstikte waarheid", one of the poems in the book. Born in 1956, she still works as an independent translator, translating from English into Dutch. more…

All Ludy Bührs poems | Ludy Bührs Books

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