Cully sent me this poem — so good. <\/p>\n
A Dog Has Died<\/p>\n
BY PABLO NERUDA
\nTranslated by Alfred Yankauer<\/p>\n
My dog has died.
\nI buried him in the garden
\nnext to a rusted old machine.<\/p>\n
Some day I’ll join him right there,
\nbut now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
\nhis bad manners and his cold nose,
\nand I, the materialist, who never believed
\nin any promised heaven in the sky
\nfor any human being,
\nI believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
\nYes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
\nwhere my dog waits for my arrival
\nwaving his fan-like tail in friendship.<\/p>\n
Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
\nof having lost a companion
\nwho was never servile.
\nHis friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
\nwithholding its authority,
\nwas the friendship of a star, aloof,
\nwith no more intimacy than was called for,
\nwith no exaggerations:
\nhe never climbed all over my clothes
\nfilling me full of his hair or his mange,
\nhe never rubbed up against my knee
\nlike other dogs obsessed with sex.<\/p>\n
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
\npaying me the attention I need,
\nthe attention required
\nto make a vain person like me understand
\nthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,
\nbut, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
\nhe’d keep on gazing at me
\nwith a look that reserved for me alone
\nall his sweet and shaggy life,
\nalways near me, never troubling me,
\nand asking nothing.<\/p>\n
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
\nas we walked together on the shores of the sea
\nin the lonely winter of Isla Negra
\nwhere the wintering birds filled the sky
\nand my hairy dog was jumping about
\nfull of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
\nmy wandering dog, sniffing away
\nwith his golden tail held high,
\nface to face with the ocean’s spray.<\/p>\n
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
\nas only dogs know how to be happy
\nwith only the autonomy
\nof their shameless spirit.<\/p>\n
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
\nand we don’t now and never did lie to each other.<\/p>\n
So now he’s gone and I buried him,
\nand that’s all there is to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cully sent me this poem — so good. A Dog Has Died BY PABLO NERUDA Translated by Alfred Yankauer My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I’ll join him right there, but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}