Find and share the perfect poems.
Like the dog who forgot
where he buried his bone
the old farmer forgot
where he buried the dog.
Excerpted from Dog Show by Billy Collins. Copyright © 2025 by Billy Collins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
There are dogs who will follow you
perpetually and as gladly
as if it were their purpose in life,
at least while in the act of following you.
Other dogs enjoy being followed.
They sniff around, look back, then run ahead.
W. B. Yeats, so monumentally heartsick,
spent his boyhood summers
following a black dog and a white dog
around the hilly Irish countryside,
as if that were the purpose of his life,
which it might have been at the time.
From a couch
littered with throw pillows
they are staring at me
and my open notebook,
and even though their tails
are not twitching
and their secret inboard
motors are not audible,
I know they are assuming
in unison
that I am writing
yet another dog poem
rather than one about
the two of them,
but as you can see,
they are actually
featured here,
an irony which is all
He tried it once
as a last resort,
but most of the women
were a million years old.