Jasmin Horts Seiler told me that if I wanted I could write about my dog Kaiser.
Knowing what Ed Matlack is feeling about is Rufuz, I wish to tell Jasmin how my dog and I came to be, how it ended and why it haunted me since.

Everyone was at the time tired and wishing
by the freezing Christmas night of 1944,
of summer days in sunny California and
that the fighters will call it quits and done.

From the rubble of a collapsed building
came a faint whining of a little puppy dog,
its mother crushed by the falling masonry
how it survived I wouldn’t ever know.

Of a German Shepherd race, the big pup
was trembling so much that I nearly lost
it from my arms grip holding him against
my chest, a little fur pouch full of bones.

First night he sleep with a weak whining
inside the blanked wrapping us both,
after his belly was full of powder milk
the only one in the battlefront you got.

Just for fun I named it for the regal Kaiser,
no one in my life needed me, just a dog?
a child soldier holding an orphan puppy
two halves, for life, of one and same love.

Smuggled on a ship back to the States
after the insanity of man’s created storms,
welcoming silence to sleepless nights
of two friends having only each other for.

Big but gentle, prancing on the beach
like a purebred happy little horse,
no man can have a better friend than that,
send to love orphans by almighty God.

Many years passed since my dear friend
look me in the eyes, he was then very old,
I swear I saw tears of sadness there, before
he lowered his head and my friend was gone.

Kaiser was not “just” a dog.