Four-legged loss
May 10, 2025
I work the dread so many times
that it’s a kind of sudoku in my head —
rehearsing death like an actor a play.
Hopefully one day she will just not get up,
lie too long in her habitual basket
and avoid that dreaded visit to the vet.
There, liquid death is delivered kindly,
but the syringe is always filled with guilt
alongside yellow pentobarbital.
How can a dog understand that love
might write a prescription for death?
She can’t. She licks my hand, trust
written in the ageing eyes, so cloudy.
Human minds flick through possibility,
feel the knot of loss before death.
But dogs just are. Until they’re not.
PS Cottier
This poem was published in last year’s Grieve anthology, a book made up of entries to a yearly competition organised by the Hunter Writers Centre. The dog who inspired the poem has just died, being put to sleep at home, so I thought I’d republish the poem here. Anyone who has a dog in their life dreads the moment that they die, and believes their dog to be the best in the world. Vale Mango, my much missed Staffie. Fifteen years, and not nearly enough.
Poem: Nyx and Neon
January 21, 2024
The darkness and its dreams
have been tossed out like bottle caps,
or plastic wrappers, illuminated
into nothingness. Old goddesses
swapped for this new electricity,
these garish sharp scars flashing.
Neon is the worst, an intoxicating
brightness. He was recently elevated
to a minor god. I curse his vulgar
yellow slaps upon the face
of the sleeping earth, his bold
assertion of light when all
should give themselves to rest.
Newness needs to be won,
rebirthed at dawn, not lost
in this glut of fluorescence,
snarling through the black.
But I am Nyx, and I know —
Neon can never reach
the human’s rest of death.
There nothing disturbs the mud,
except the damp, and the quiet,
thorough recycling of the worms,
palest pink yet avid.
PS Cottier
Nyx personifies night, and was the goddess of the night. Neon was discovered in 1898, and is a ‘noble gas’, although Nyx doesn’t see it that way in my poem.
PS Cottier 