Mi perro ha muerto.
Lo enterré en el jardín
junto a una vieja máquina oxidada.
Allí, no más abajo,
ni más arriba,
se juntará conmigo alguna vez.
Ahora él ya se fue con su pelaje,
su mala educación, su nariz fría.
Y yo, materialista que no cree
en el celeste cielo prometido
para ningún humano,
para este perro o para todo perro
creo en el cielo, sí, creo en un cielo
donde yo no entraré, pero él me espera
ondulando su cola de abanico
para que yo al llegar tenga amistades.
Oh, I won't speak of the sadness on earth at no longer having him as a companion, for he was never a servant to me. He had for me the friendship of a hedgehog that retained its sovereignty, the friendship of an independent star with no more intimacy than necessary, without exaggeration: he didn't climb all over my clothes, covering me in fur or giving me mange, he didn't rub against my knee like other sexually obsessed dogs. No, my dog looked at me, giving me the necessary attention, the attention necessary to make a vain man understand that, being a dog himself, with those eyes, purer than mine, he was wasting his time, but he looked at me with the gaze that he reserved for me all his sweet, furry life, his silent life, close to me, never bothering me, and never asking anything of me. Oh, how many times I longed to have a tail, walking beside him along the seashore, in the winter of Isla Negra, in the great solitude: above, the air pierced by glacial birds and my dog leaping, shaggy, full of the movement of the sea: my wandering, olfactory dog, waving his golden tail face to face with the Ocean and its foam. Joyful, joyful, joyful as dogs know how to be happy, with nothing more, with the absoluteness of unashamed nature. There is no goodbye to my dog who has died. And there is not, nor was there ever, a lie between us. He is gone now, and I buried him, and that was all.
By Pablo Neruda