The dog
Sometimes
in the early hours
the dog’s toenails click on the passage lino.
That dog has been gone
two decades, nearly:
sometimes one of them hears him, sometimes both.
Though they never say
they both remember
the night the boy died:
how the dog crept in
that one time
where he wasn’t allowed;
hollowed himself
a sleeping-place by the bed.
Judith Taylor lives and works in Aberdeen. She has written two pamphlet collections – Earthlight, (2006), and Local Colour (2010) – and her first full-length collection, Not in nightingale country, will be published this October by Red Squirrel Press.