O Puppy, My Puppy

When we occupied Camp Borepatch, I installed a moat to enhance the defenses.  A moat cunningly disguised as a pond with a waterfall:

Basically, we modified the local environment, making Camp Borepatch an attractive home for things that like to live in water.  Then I got a puppy.  Wolfgang does not like to live in water, but is exceedingly interested in creatures that do.

Exceedingly. And so what did my horrified gaze reveal?

That black ragged blanket you see in the foreground is the plastic pond liner, fished out of the drink by a nearly 100 pound still "teenage" puppy in pursuit of some inoffensive aquatic creature.  Oh, bother.  And so with apologies to Walt Whitman, a funeral poem for the pond:

O PUPPY! my Puppy! our fearful dig is done;
The spine has weather'd every ache, the prize we sought is won;
The pond is near, the falls I hear, the Missus all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady stream, the water cool and sparkling:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the ragged shreds of mat,
Where in the yard my fountain lies,
An empty dried up vat.


O Puppy! my Puppy! your muddy soaking paws;
Tell your tale -- you battled long and vanquished with your jaws;
For you cascades and gentle streams had no fascination;
Building feats with water flowing just by gravitation;
Here Puppy! dear Puppy!
This hole beneath my feet;
It is some dream that now the yard,
Is sudden uncomplete.


My Puppy does not answer, his tail 'twixt legs is hid;
My pond does not hold water, not like it one time did;
The critter Wolfie dug out fled, its home is closed and done;
From fearful pup, the digging up, the liner fairly won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the yard my Puppy guards,
The pond is cold and dead.

Please no comments from poetry purists that this is just doggerel.