Rhydwen Williams
Dogs
The whole of doghood I've seen in my time
Dogs great, dogs small, dogs comic, dogs godly and good;
Dogs under-arm, dogs under-arse, dogs dull, dogs devoted to crime,
Dogs highbrow, dogs a-grovel, dogs dishevelled, dogs a plague in flood.
Yes, I've seen and heard the whole canine catalogue,
And I have still in my nostrils the smell of two generations of dog.
Well I remember yesteryear's dogs in the long ago Valley
Funny little old mongrel dogs; dogs of every size and format;
Dogs happy, dogs bereft, dogs that would dog you up any old alley,
Dogs fearless of both man and devil—except sometimes the devil of a cat!
Carrying messages and cocking legs, the little old dogs of our boyhood,
More alive to me now than ever—though gone, a long time since, for good.
Of the Mansion and its hounds recollection now stirs
I was the servant boy, shining shoes, chopping logs, replenishing coal.
Mine the joy before breakfast of feeding and grooming those loathsome curs,
Unleashing their lusts, giving them a hand to lick, taking them for a stroll.
To be a lackey to a dog is something most men would rather not,
But set aside the gentry and the stench, and that's exactly the lackey's lot.
By dogs I was surrounded from the day that I first saw the light—
Wil Ty-Cwrdd's dog and Tomos the Shop's, Gran's dog and the dog next door;
And when there'd seem not a hair of the wild menagerie in sight
Suddenly there'd come a woof-beneath-the-bed or an under-the-sofa scratching of floor.
A dog might seem a priceless creation, but the truth is, though some may find it odd,
That it has in abundance the virtues of Man, the Devil's devisings and the omnipresence of God.
The old fellowship by now has more or less come to an end:
Of pedigree companions all that's left to me is just this one.
A lop-eared, amusing dandy of a boy, whom I never have to reprehend,
With his back and his legs like hedges and his bark like the blast from a gun.
In an hour or so we'll go out, him and me, have a walkies powwow.
The pedigree sign of a bow tie marking the higher-nosed one as a bow-wow.
Welsh; trans. Nigel Jenkins
Rhydwen Williams, Welsh, trans. Nigel Jenkins.