Cat poetry

Remembering our recently departed and beloved cat … and Mark Twain’s quote is hitting home:  “A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title.”

It seems that poets have kept cats and written about them throughout history. On a trip to Oregon a few years ago, I picked up a book called The Poetical Cat edited by Felicity Bast.  It includes cat poems from all over the world … from the tombs of ancient Egypt … to the  works of the Haiku masters … to Swinburne, Baudelaire, Yeats, and William Carlos Williams.

It is offering some comfort.  Perhaps most apropos is Thomas Hardy’s Last Words to a Dumb Friend, which is an elegy for his beloved, departed pet.  It goes on in his quaint, Victorian way that may sound stilted to our modern ears.  But its final verse is beautiful and heartbreaking.

From Last Words to a Dumb Friend
by Thomas Hardy

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

Pretty sad, that verse.

If I tried to write an elegy I would probably blubber on and on longer than Hardy.  So I won’t.

Instead, in honor of our dear and departed Quincy, I’ll offer a couple of cat haiku I’ve written over the years:

Cat Haiku

The old cat forgets
to groom his matted fur. But
there — on snow — feathers!

Little cat using
me for shade doesn’t care I’ve
nothing left to give

Waking with a stretch
the cat falls off the bed’s edge —
dignity wounded