POEM: My Little Doggie

MY LITTLE DOGGIE
By Bruce Wales
8-15-10

My little Doggie is upstairs in bed
Wincing and oozing from bruises and cuts
From thorns by their thousands that she ran through
To flee from the fus’llade of bullets that boomed
From the canyon we’d spied when looking to swim.

My little Doggie keeps licking her paws
Reddened and tender from merc’less terrain
Of splinters and shards of the rain-exposed rock
Endured up a mountainside - legs pounding down
Claws and pads sacrificed - must carry on.

My little Doggie will totter to stand
Muscles and tendons adren’linly stretched
From the ne’er-ending sprint up the vertical run
To climb, run and climb with crazed fear inside
Toward a valley somewhere to quiet her mind.

My little Doggie is haunted by dread
Of terrors and fears endured on the mount
In moonless blackness she shivered and shook
Each second- each second - clinging to life
Blindly awake through a forever night.

My little Doggie did not hear the man
From two campsites north with gun still in hand
When begged not to shoot in the campground again,
“Come morning, I’ll shoot in the canyon again.”
Half hour later he shot night time again!

My little Doggie was found earli’st morn
By me, disbelieving the eyes in my head
On top of the mountain, still never a bark
She circled the scrub slowly towards me, subdued.
We clung, cooed and cried, then, I carried her down.

My little Doggie was leashed in our camp
Unable to lie, she trembled, rump-tucked,
Whirling directions awaiting assault
While camping equipment was stowed in the car
T’scape from the terror that pervaded the place.

My little Doggie will carry deep fears-
A traumatized dog - each day of her years
My loathing’s as deep for the arrogant man
Who decides arbitrar’ly what to shoot, when,
His life, seems to me, less a creature of God, than
My little Doggie, a blameless good dog.