Last Thoughts of a Famous Dog*

In his grey coat, he seemed a friendly man,
leaning towards me with a piece of meat.
I followed, jumped into his van –
the last I saw of my Moscow streets.
We drove through suburbs I didn’t know,
I snuffled and scratched at the bars.
Those first flakes of Autumn snow
hit the windscreen and drifted off like stars.
A uniformed man lifted the boom,
we passed through the gates of an institute.
Washed and fed, kept in a sterile room,
I was named and numbered – a new recruit.
I remember a dark journey in another van
down roads that never seemed to end.
I sniffed the frozen air of Kazakhstan,
and scented something burnt in the wind.
From my porthole I see the sky’s arc expand,
below me, the vanishing cosmodrome.
Noise and killing heat. Now I understand –
this famous dog is never coming home.

MIKE LADD is currently producer and presenter of the ABC Radio National poetry program PoeticA. His most recent books are Close to Home, published by Five Islands Press, and Rooms and Sequences from Salt Publishing.

* Laika, the first living creature sent into space, was launched in Sputnik II on the 3 November, 1957. She was not a dog specially bred for the space program, but a stray taken from the streets of Moscow. Her name means ‘barker’ in Russian. There was no intention to return Laika to earth. For many years it was assumed she died painlessly about a week after the launch but new information suggests Laika died from overheating and stress only four hours after take-off. Her ‘coffin’ circled the Earth 2,570 times and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere on 4 April 1958.