A HUNGRY DOG

“If a man has food and there is a hungry dog, he must share his food with the dog, even if the dog bites him.”

One night a husband and wife were walking along the streets of the city. They were attacked by a robber with a knife. He tried to kill the husband. The husband fought off the robber but was critically wounded. He lost his eyesight.

A few months later his wife left him, claiming she couldn’t stay married to a blinmd man. In truth she went to live with the same robber, who was her lover, had been her lover for over a year. They had planned the attack together. her husband never knew this, but still his heart was broken. He sold everything he owned and bought himself a little cottage in the woods. Everybody said he was mad, to live blindly by himself in the middle of nowhere. But to him it made perfect sense. Every day he would sit and listen to the birds. A year later his vision was miraculously restored.

A few weeks later he heard a noise outside his cottage in the trees. He peered out through the window and saw what seemed to be a man dragging a woman’s body into the bushes. He did nothing, he said nothing to anybody. Only when the police turned up at his cottage did he tell them what he’d seen. But they didn’t believe him. They arrested him for murder. They’d found a woman’s body buried in the woods, and a bloody hatchet in his shed. The murdered woman was his ex-wife.

He spent the rest of his life in a State mental institution. Everybody thought he was mad. He began to write poems. Every day he would write a new poem, then rip it into little pieces and cast the pieces through the bars of his cell, to let the wind do with them as it will. But in his heart he knew the birds would gather the pieces together and read his words. Only the birds would appreciate his poetry. Everybody thought he was mad.

Before he died he asked if these words could be inscribed on his headstone : “If a man has food and there is a hungry dog, he must share his food with the dog, even if the dog bites him.” Of course he was buried in an unmarked grave. Nothing sane can survive an insane world.