MY FRIEND DICK
Let me tell you about the dog I truly love.
Oh I had a cat once that used to call me
From other rooms to play.
But he was indifferent in the spring.
Not my dog Dick. Even now he is here
Lying at my feet and goes where I go
In sadness through the hills.
He is my friend - my one true friend.
When last I left him for other loves
Beyond the seas, beyond this time,
They say he cried as humans do.
Do you believe me? He and cried.
But when an old fellow he knew well
Opened the gete one day and greeted him
Dick could not talk. He could not say
He loved me - that I had gone away.
You understand ,don't you? ,whay he felt so,
I saved him from a master
Who used him as a slave
And only kindness made him my friend.
By the gate then he could not talk
Or know where I had gone.
I had a little car and it was there.
Abandoned, a wreck - without its wheels.
It had taken him everywhere I would go;
To town - into the country - here and there·
He knew it. It almost lived for him.
It even smelled of my dog Dick.
There then - there beneath the very sun
Where flowers grow and grow all day long.
My friend Dick, to say what he could not say
Did something else a human would not do.
He went up to the old man and looked at him
Then led him to my crate without its wheels
And there beneath the world of gleaming flowers
Embraced one fender with his paws and wept.
