ODE TO AN OLD DOG
by: Scott B. Thompson, Sr.
Inspired by Jimmy Stewart

There once was a dog named Earl.
We called him Mister Earl.
He was a lab, old  and black,
And no one, but my wife, who would take him back.

Earl came to us with a badly broken leg,
“There’s no choice,” she was told.
They said it was some kind of car,
which knocked him down on the side of the road.







“This broken leg had to come off,”.
they told me wife.
“No, no, no, not right now, she said,
“We must save his life!”



The splint she wrapped over and over,
time after time, three to four times a day.
Earl was going to walk, perhaps run  again,
if she had her way.

Earl couldn’t walk so well,
and Earl was much too fat.
Though that did not stop him from climbing on the sofa,
sleeping off his Thanksgiving turkey, that’s where he sat.

Then came the worms in his heart,
And the cloudiness in his eyes.
Earl was too old and couldn’t run,
Though his inner puppy still wanted to have fun.

Earl loved to take a hotdog with a pill.
That was his twice daily thrill.
He gobbled and gobbled all the food he could,
and when his dark eyes smiled, you knew it was good.

Earl was a odd old dog, one which never barked,
though he would snap at the mischievous and curious pups,
Putting them in their place
when they tried to lick the crumbs from his gray-bearded face.

There were those bad nights, when his breathing was hard.
and Kathy laid by his side in the middle of the night.
She lovingly stroked and stroked his all black hair,
and when the morning slowly came, he was still there.

Earl has gone out running now,
Bolting his days in the golden  meadows of heaven
and sleeping his nights on a pillows of soft, soft, foam.
Dashing and darting where all the old dogs forever roam.

There will always be those nights when creeping through the kitchen dark,
when we still look down for that blur of black
and we wish he would rise his head up and thump his tail.
For there never be a sweeter dog in the whole wide world
than a dog we called Mister Earl.