Dirty Dogs Campaign: This foul mess: A poet protest
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Your support makes all the difference.Andrew Motion: The grass bit in our square clearly says No Dogs, and it's knee-deep in dog shit, as are most of the parks and most of the streets. The kids are always picking it up and we run through it with the buggy wheels. It's time to put our foot down - but carefully.
It Is An Offence
The man in the flats opposite keeps a whippet
(once a racer) and two or three times a week
it craps by my front door - sloped, weary turds
like a single file of slugs in battle fatigues
(surprisingly slow for a whippet) - so that often
my shoes, my wife's, our children's bring it back home
to the stairs, the skirting, the carpets, the kitchen tiles
in bobbles or flakes or hanks or outrageous slithery smears.
The sad old dog doesn't know what he's doing, and yet
I'd still like to cover his arsehole with quick-set cement.
I admit that I also yearn to leave my mark on society,
and not see machines or people trample it foolishly.
On the one hand it's only shit; on the other, shit's shit,
and what we desire in the world is less, not more, of it.
From Love in a Life (Faber pounds 6.99)
(Photograph omitted)
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