April is Poetry Month--a poem for each day we are open

For Saturday April 4th

Three Dog Neighborhood
Chosen by Eliza (Why I will always have a Rottweiler)

By Daniel Barth

Pretty Straightforward this one,
About my friend Pete and his wife Susan.
They bought an old house in Denver
Down on the Platte River.
Shortly thereafter their tv got stolen.
They bought a dog, a good-sized dog,
To keep an eye on things.
But it didn't help, they were burgled again.
This time the investigating officer said:
"You live in a three dog neighborhood."
"Huh?" said Pete (not in a good mood)
"One for the front yard, one for the back yard,
One for the house," explained the cop--
Three dog neigborhood,"
"Yeah right," said Pete, "Now I'm hip."



Donna's Choice
Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 4, 2009

Anniversary: One Fine Day
by Walter McDonald

Who would sit through a plot as preposterous as ours,
married after years apart? Chance meetings may work
early in stories, but at operas, darling, in Texas?
A bachelor pilot, I fled Laredo for the weekend,
stopping at the opera from boredom, music I least expected.
Of all the zoos and honky-tonks south of Dallas,
who would believe I would find you there on the stairs,

Madame Butterfly about to start? When you moved
four years before, I lost all hope of dying happy,
dogfighting my way through pilot training, reckless,
in terror only when I saw the man beside you.
I had pictured him rich and splendid in my mind
a thousand times, thinking you married with babies
somewhere in Tahiti, Spain, the south of France.

When I saw the lucky devil I hated – only your date,
but I didn’t know – he stopped gloating, watching you wave,
turned old and bitter like the crone in Shangri La.
Destiny happens only in plays and cheap movies –
but here, here on my desk is your photo, decades later,
and I hear sounds from another room of our house,
and when I rise amazed and follow, you are there.