In memoriam: Shelley

2014.09.18-2025.07.02

Shelley,
little white god-footed Shelley,
with your one brown spot like a thumbprint of Heaven,
you trotted out of Sarajevo like a pilgrim of love,
and found me.

You—bright bit of spirit wrapped in fur,
Bosnian breadstick between your clever jaws,
so proud!
You danced on the war-cracked pavements
as if the ruins were just another garden
God forgot to water.

You loved—
not like a man loves,
not with conditions,
not with that miser’s ledger ticking in his head—
but like light loves a leaf,
or water loves the earth.

You loved my father,
you loved my mother,
you curled like a warm, breathing halo
at their feet—
your white fur was the down of angels
God misplaced in Sarajevo,
and I found you.

You came
not barking commandments,
but wagging gospel,
not from Sinai,
but from the gutters and alleyways of war,
a little prophet with soft ears
and a snout that smelled the truth.

O Shelley,
you were not a dog,
you were the soul’s companion,
not the animal part—
but the divine,
the quiet ember in the cold hearth
of a tired world.

Your paws pattered sermons
more eternal than any book,
and your eyes—
brown wells of unknowable gentleness—
looked through me,
saw the wound I didn’t know I carried,
and licked it with silence.

When you died,
the world dimmed.
The sky forgot its blue,
the bread lost its warmth,
and my heart—
well, my heart grew a little hole,
the size of your curled sleeping form.

But I remember you.
Not in stone or picture,
but in the way the light falls across the table at dawn,
and in the way bread smells when I tear it,
and in the sudden feeling that God is very near—
and wagging His tail.