If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
I’d roll them up into the light of intelligence in one dog’s eyes.
I’d pat him and stroke him and tell him unashamedly how
This friendship across species astounds me every day.
So rock me, my good old boy, befriend me like the wind,
You’ll be with me when the gates fly open and death walks in
With the shaman-spirit that will be: the Paiute Wovoka* ghost dance
That will drive away every morsel of this dirty money-grabbing
Respectable massacre of everything that be wild, that be wilful, that be wondrous.
And artfulness helps us create resistance in this age of the machine
There is worth in the unseen. In the perspicacity and prescience that
Was once the common currency of the most illiterate, boorish Celt.

* - The Northern Paiute spiritual leader, Wovoka, showed that the proper practice of the ghost dance would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead.