My visitor this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Jo Van Arkel, who lives in Springfield, Missouri. Professor Van Arkel is a Teaching Fellow in Writing, Department of Languages and Literature, at Drury University. She began writing poems and tales when she was a baby, impressed by the numerous books she checked out from her native library. She likes to put in writing each poetry and fiction and is at the moment at work on a novella in flash about life within the Ozark Mountains. She has a letterpress studio the place she makes prints and etchings that generally illustrate her phrases. ~ David L. Harrison
Elegy for a canine
I’m sharing with you an elegy for my canine Scruffers, who was a small black and tan Jack Russell combine my household rescued from a shelter. Scruffers was a good-looking fellow with a jaunty stride. He and I saved firm collectively for greater than ten seasons.
An elegy may be very old poetic kind that serves as each a lament and a celebration. It might sound unusual to put in writing an elegy for a canine, however as many writers and poets have discovered, pets generally and dogs specifically, make fantastic muses. Scruffers, as an illustration, taught me the artwork of taking a gradual walk across the block, pausing to smell each scent and research even essentially the most delicate shift within the grass for indicators {that a} mole is perhaps hidden simply beneath the subsequent gentle mound of dust.
Dogs have a manner of weaving themselves into our on a regular basis rhythms and rituals, and after they die, we really feel loss of life most acutely by means of their absence — they not run to the door to greet us or do a cheerful dance within the morning after we rise or observe us round to lick up any crumbs we’d drop from a day snack.
I now have a brand new canine at my toes. Her identify is Story, and he or she has her personal distinctive proclivities together with a behavior of working vast circles within the yard to specific her pleasure anytime somebody comes to go to. She retains me in a relentless state of marvel on the pleasures and challenges of sharing life with an animal. But I’ve not forgotten the teachings Scruffers taught me, and I miss him nonetheless.
Elegy
Dogs lives are too quick.
Their solely fault actually.
Agnes Sligh Turnbull
This is earlier than we
put the canine down,
so there may be nonetheless time
to drive to the
park, prime peeled again,
sky for a rooftop.
It’s not pleasure
precisely, extra like
vainness to say keep
with me eternally—or
at the very least by means of yet another
cycle of seasons.
We imagine, the canine
and I, we are able to monitor
down scent of these
who’ve come earlier than,
sniffing on the roots
of no matter is misplaced.
❖❖❖
Learn extra about Jo Van Arkel’s writing and artwork at her web site: jobethvanarkel.com.
