A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda

Oh I shall not tell the sadness on the earth
For not having him any more as companion,
He who was never for me a servant.
He showed towards me the friendship of a hedgehog
That preserved its sovereignty,
The friendship of an independent star
Without more intimacy than was necessary,
Without going to extremes:
He would never climb over my clothes
Covering me with hairs and mange,
Nor would he rub up against my knee
Like other sexually obsessed dogs.
No, my dog would look at me,
Giving me the attention that I need,
The necessary attention
To make a vain person like me understand
That, as he was a dog
With eyes purer than mine,
I was wasting his time, but he would look at me
With the look that his silent life,
All his gentle, hairy life
Reserved for me,     
Near me, without ever annoying me
And without asking anything from me.

Oh how many times did I want to have a tail
And go bounding along beside him on the sea shore,
In the Isla negra wintertime,     
In the big, solitary open spaces; up there the air
And its ice-cold birds,
And my dog jumping, hairy, full
of marine voltage in motion:
My dog roving around and all nose,
And golden tail stuck high in the air
In front of the Ocean and its foam.

Happy, happy, happy
In the way that dogs know how to be happy,
With nothing else, with the absolutism
Of barefaced nature.

There are no goodbyes for my dog who has died.
And there are not, nor ever were, lies between us.
He has gone now and I buried him, and that’s all
there is to it.