Poetry Sunday

I have always loved cats. Looking back through the family album I see cats everywhere. On the farm they were necessary to keep mice, gophers, and rats in check. In fact when the dairy herd was sold and most of the cats given away, we were suddenly overrun with rats. An exterminator was required to rid the farm of them, since they found plentiful amounts of leftover grain in the buildings, and no cats were there to kill the pests. These days having a cat is just a pleasure, especially these cool days when she keeps my lap warm and I return the favor.


The cat’s song
by Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.