Due by Saturday

Dogs Don’t Have Souls, Do They?” Chuck Wells I remember bringing you home. You were so small and cuddly with your tiny paws and soft fur. You bounced around the room with eyes flashing  and ears flopping. Once in a while you'd let out a little yelp just to let me know this was your territory.​(5) Making a mess of the house and chewing everything in sight became a passion, and when I scolded you, you just put your head down and looked up at me with those innocent eyes, as if to say, "I'm sorry, but I'll do it again as soon as you're not watching."​(10) As you got older, you protected me by looking out the window and barking at everyone who walked by. When I had a tough day at work, you would be waiting for me with your tail wagging just to say,  "Welcome home, I missed you."​(15) You never had a bad day, and I could always count on  you to be there for me. When I sat down to read the paper and watch TV, you would hop on my lap, looking for attention. You never asked for anything more than for me to pat your head​(20) so you could go to sleep with your head over my leg. As you got older, you moved around more slowly. Then, one day, old age finally took its toll, and you couldn't stand on those wobbly legs anymore, I knelt down and patted you lying there, trying to make you young again.​(25) You just looked up to me as if to say you were old and tired and that after all these years of not asking for anything, you had to ask for one last favor. With tears in my eyes, I drove you one last time to the​(30) vet. One last time, you were lying next to me. For some strange reason, you were able to stand up in the animal hospital; perhaps it was your sense of pride. As the vet led you away, you stopped for an instant, turned your head and looked at me as if to say,​(35) "Thank you for taking care of me." I thought, "No....thank you for taking care of me."         “Names of Horses” (1978) Donald Hall (b. 1928) All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames*, to haul​*the wooden piece of a harness   sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range. In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,​(5) dark manure of Holsteins*, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.    *black and white dairy cows All summer you mowed the grass in the meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine clacketing beside, while the sun walked high in the morning; and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,​(10) and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning. Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill ​(15) of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass. When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze, one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond, and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,​(20) and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear, and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you, where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument. For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,​(25) roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.     Hall, Donald.  “Names of Horses.”  An Introduction to Poetry, edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana   Gioia.  HaperCollins, 1994, pp. 344-5.   Wells, Chuck.  “Dogs Don’t Have Souls, Do They?”  Healing and Inspirational Poetry.   <http://www.petloss.com/poems/maingrp/dogsdont.htm>. Accessed 2 Aug. 2017.