Poem Of The Week Children's Special: My Dog Is A Three-Letter Spell By Annick Yerem

My Dog is a Three-Letter Spell

Faith turned fur, an incantation. I am sure he can fly, especially at
night, across rabbit-blooming fields, across pasta valleys, over tripe
rivers, sausage mountains. He can hear mice dreaming, he is one step
ahead, then ten.

My dog is a prayer, all ears, all joy, all yes. When it´s hot, it´s hot,
when it´s cold it´s cold. Food is love is being there is breathing. The
world does not have to be complicated.

My place in his heart is at least as wide and loud as the fridge door opening.

My dog is this moment, is present, is a lesson in here.

He owes me nothing. I owe him cheese. I owe him joy.

Annick Yerem’s perceptive and rather beautiful poem is aimed notionally at children, but its presence in an eclectic collection of children’s poetry should by no means limit its wider mandate. An homage to the simple, transparent affection of people for dogs, and more significantly, of dogs for people, the poem addresses a relationship that dog-lovers of all ages and stripes will intuitively recognise.

And it is the natural, pared-back quality of Yerem’s thinking that gives ‘My Dog is a Three-Letter Spell’ its unusual power. Nailing a joyous Pavlovian instinct with brio – the pasta valleys, sausage mountains and tripe rivers are metaphorical projections of salivatory urges – the narrator detects no sense of a disjuncture between the emotional and alimentary components of this easeful, mutually rewarding transaction. Except that the word ‘transaction’ commodifies the true meaning of an arrangement that is essentially loving.

Capturing the binary simplicity of doggy impulses by occluding the boundaries that might otherwise separate, say, eating from the satisfaction of having a belly rub, Yerem arrives at a happy resolution in the immediacy of the contented now – ‘My dog is this moment, is present’.

Nothing, in the end, matters, in the face of a dog’s great ‘yes’ of affirmation, save for the desire to reciprocate, to return that love:

He owes me nothing. I owe him cheese. I owe him joy

‘My Dog is a Three-Letter Spell’ is taken from Chasing Clouds: Brilliant Adventures in a Poetry Balloon, and is published by Yorkshire Times Publishing.

More information here