Dion O’Reilly
Ode to the Dog
It’s been millennia.
This love of stick and chase.
Pack love. Love of wild meat
Run down and flame blackened.
Warmth of fire,
The way we lay together
At the line between flickering heat and fear,
Your dirty fur held close
Against our naked skin.
Forty-thousand years, they say,
Since you came to our aid,
Wiping out the Neanderthal,
Thinning their game,
Grafting four-legged speed
To the guile of our strange brains.
Forty-thousand years side-by-side
Since you left your wild
Brother wolf for us.
We see that sometimes
When you forget who you are—
Snap at a kitten or clamp your teeth
Around the jeaned thigh of a stranger.
Or we notice in your fulsome eyes
What you’ve lost
When you slink into shame,
Accept choke chains and neglect.
And don’t we also pay a price?
Our human lifespans so much longer—
We must watch the same old friend,
One by one, die a different death.
Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.
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