Collection

Dog Poems

Our best friends teach us loyalty, recklessness, and caring.

BY The Editors

Black and white image of a dachshund watching little Shih Tzus go by on the street.
Dachshund watching little Shih Tzus go by, circa 1969. Photo by Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Great Companions
Faithful dogs wait, at the window or the foot of the bed, with full devotion.
  • Teeth into floating wood
    Then bound back to their owners
    Shining wet, with passionate speed
  • and now he's howling like a beagle – yips, brays,
             gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless,
                  that's how much he's missed you, the two of you,  
  • For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and
    whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.
  • But of thee it shall be said,
    This dog watched beside a bed
       Day and night unweary, —  
In Memory Of Our Dog
A mourned family pet fill these poems with love and grief.
  • What remains, the memory of how
    she taught us all the way we need
    to learn to live with wasting.
    There we sit, together, one last time
    as all that sweetness slowly disappears.
  • all his sweet and shaggy life,
    always near me, never troubling me,
    and asking nothing.
  • In late autumn the hound
    gone now ten years, has come
  • My God, tomorrow’s ride . . . Well, here we are,
    right now. You stare at me and wag your tail.
  • He’s gone to some
    utopos now, the dirty dog, doctor of
    crotches, digger of holes.
Strays And Rescue Dogs
These dogs get into messes and mischief—all while relishing their freedom.

    • Dog

      Lawrence Ferlinghetti
    a real realist
    with a real tale to tell
    and a real tail to tell it with

    • poetry-magazine

      Dog

      Weldon Kees
    But now, my bark a ghost in this strange scentless air
    I am no growling cicerone or cerberus,
    But wreckage for the pound, snuffling in shame
  • Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.
    As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.
    His love of the war poets was well known.
  • We find a dog, hungry and sad as a suitcase kicked open
    And showing nothing.
  • Oh yes, they were bad, my childhood dogs,
  • I rethink kicking him out,
    but being cool, I let him in.
  •             and everyone understanding that once more Bosco
       had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature.  
Dog Stories
These fables provide allegories and lessons for dog owners and walkers.
  • Two hundred miles north I’d let the dog
    run among birches and the black shade of pines.
  •           loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,
    able to exist only for the sake of existing. 
  • every day I watch her using
    the yard’s big maple as the apex of a triangle
  • We ought to be reminded of Aesop’s dog, who set out
    With a bone
  •                                                    I bet the Eighth Street Dog
    had been a movie star, because everything I read
    about movie stars suggests they can’t control themselves
    for more than five minutes. 
  • Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,
    Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,
A Dog's Perspective
Do dogs hear the same songs we do? Do they understand us? Will we ever understand them?
  • More than once I've seen a dog
    waiting for its owner outside a café
    practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
  • Does he hear? I fancy he rather smells
    Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel’s
    “Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui s’aiment.”
  • The true strains rise only from
    the rich, red chambers of a canine heart,
    these melodies best when the moon is up,
  • When I put my mouth to her ear
    and shout her name. She walks away.
  • If we had only learned to speak
    The tongue of dogs instead of Greek,