Practical Cat on Cinco De Mayo, a poem … and your next Wednesday Writing Prompt
“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.” Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Gigi and the Cat
had we homÍnidos our wits, we’d have had his cojones clipped
before some perro made him into a crippled capon, that tomcat
he was boisterous and adamant and ready for trouble, it wasn’t
just his maleness he lost, it was his life, poor thing and he left
the other mourning and coughing up chicken bits and hair balls
too woebegone to steal fatty succulents from Mexicali Rose
while she was busy adjusting the bbq grill, flirting with Brian ~
those two spiced their tacos with a bit of kissy-face touchy-bod
in the heat of the heat of that summer in ’86, when we celebrated
Cinco de Mayo in the park off Alameda de las Pulgas and a new
little furry calabaza came into our lives, half-starved and dehydrated
with a heavy chain-choker some gamberro put around his neck –
idiot! – and Brian freed him and we rushed him to the vet hospital
where they repaired the damage, he became el hermano pequeño
to the black and white, the essential practical cat, forgetting her
tom and her mourning, letting that sweet boy stroll into her heart
© 2018, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit Darren Hanlon, Public Domain Photographs.com
WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT
I know you are all critter lovers, so this week’s prompt honors that. Tell us about one of your furry, feathered or other animal companions in poem/s and …
Share your poem/s on theme in the comments section below or leave a link to it/them. All poems on theme will be published on the first Tuesday following this post.
No poems submitted through email or Facebook will be published.
IF this is your first time joining us for The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, please send a brief bio and photo to me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com to introduce yourself to the community … and to me :-). These are partnered with your poem/s on first publication.
PLEASE send the bio ONLY if you are with us on this for the first time AND only if you have posted a poem (or a link to one of yours) on theme in the comments section below.
Deadline: Monday, March 11 by 8 pm Pacific Standard Time.
Anyone may take part Wednesday Writing Prompt, no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro. It’s about exercising the poetic muscle, showcasing your work, and getting to know other poets who might be new to you. This is a discerning non-judgemental place to connect.
You are welcome – encouraged – to share your poems in a language other than English but please accompany it with a translation into English.
by Getchen Del Rio
Enjoying New Toy
In new house
The Day The Cat Stood Still
https://starlightandmoonbeamsdotblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/the-day-the-cat-stood-still-a-response-to-the-poet-by-day-poetry-prompt-practical-cat-on-cinco-de-mayo-a-poem-mar-6th2019/
another submission 🙂
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Thanks 🙂
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Hello there! Hope this week is treating you well. Here is a little poem for this week’s prompt:
https://iidorun.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/sunning-the-queen-a-nonet/
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You too, Irma. Thank you!
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🐱😊🌼
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Very happy that the prompt is about cats. Here is my submission:
THE JUDGE copyright Irene Emanuel
My file was open on my desk,
I left it there a while;
I did not know a judge was close
and watching with a smile.
I started work on something new,
my file was out of sight;
the noise I heard alerted me,
I turned and got a fright.
The judge was sitting near my file,
his back was hunched and tense;
he threw-up on my poetry,
with careful negligence.
My poems must have turned his lunch,
he really was in pain;
that blasted cat disliked my work
and vomited again.
It seems my poetry is deficient,
I’ll watch TV instead;
but if that cat sits on my lap,
I’ll smack his furry head.
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Hi Jamie,
my seventh response:
If Only My Dead Dears
deliberately hid away
like our new kitten who disappears
so we cannot hear her bell,
her purrs.
We open cupboards, look under,
into, around
and sigh they’ve gone for good
this time
then smile.
And it is as if she says
he, he, couldn’t find me.
No matter how hard we look
we only find the dead in our heads.
And sometimes smile
as we remember them in a place
we had not thought to find them
for some time.
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Hi Jamie,
My sixth response:
As Abandoned
black kitten lobbed out of joyrider’s car window
top of our street, always had bare patch
on her upper thigh, could not get enough
strokes, hugs, Daddy’s girl.
in her moving owner’s back garden for months,
new owner could not keep her
due to his chickens and dog, always her small
paws catch your clothes as you pass.
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Hi, Jamie,
Here’s my fifth response:
Barrage
You hear a blackbird trill,
stroked by a gentle wisp.
You inhale seeds and grass
and suddenly know why
your Grandad spent time
out of the house in the garden
away from the barrage,
snipes and aggro of his wife.
And as you weed the bricked path
to the front door your black cat complains
to be let in and you quietly advise
that he has a perfectly serviceable
cat flap at the back, until
your wife opens the front door
and let’s him in and scowls at you
as she shuts it.
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Thankyou Jamie ❤🌼
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Jamie here’s my submission
https://starlightandmoonbeamsdotblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/one-last-moment-in-response-to-the-poet-by-day-poetry-promptpractical-cat-on-cinco-de-mayo-a-poem-mar-6th-2019/
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Hi Jamie,
Here’s my fourth response:
I Found Kittens In Our Settee
I had to trash
vintage settee
we’d just got
of off that thief Mavis.
We’d lost our fat cat.
Couldn’t find her for love nor…
Settee were making noises.
Used kitchen knife.
Found cat and new kittens
sat on £350.
Mavis hadn’t stolen it
after all. I’ll buy her some cheap wine.
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Hi Jamie,
Here is my third response:
My rough
tongue licks my sharp claws
as i see warm flesh canter up hill.
Haunches heavy with meat,
back heavy with rider.
I leap at the horses backside
claws gain purchase.
Rider crashes, hot meal gallops away.
I snarl at the dismounted man.
Human can be good meat.
He challenges me with metal.
My claws taste his blood,
again and again. He rushes
toward a spired house of stone.
Tries the locked door.
I am in the porch with him.
He a trapped animal like me.
We press on each other.
Neither tamed, die together.
(Based on the local legend of “The Cat And Man”
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Jamie please remove the Moment link. I removed it from my site.
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Done.
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Thank you
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https://poeticoceans.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/for-the-poet-by-day-wednesday-writing-prompt-dreaming-guard-%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%88%DA%BA-%D9%85%DB%8C%DA%BA-%DA%88%D9%88%D8%A8%DB%8C-%DB%8C%D8%A7-%D8%B3%D9%88%DB%8C%D8%91-%DA%BE/
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Respected Jamie Ji Thank you
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Thank YOU, Anjum Ji.
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welcome
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👍♥️🌹👏🙏
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Wow Jamie, absolutely love your poem. What a pleasure to read!
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Thank you, Sharon. A great compliment coming from you.
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These are just a few. I’ve often said that if they don’t allow dogs in Heaven, then I don’t want to go there. ❤
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Amen! 👍😊
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“West Wind”
(Raanana, August 3, 2013)
Her spirit rushes over the waving grasses
And the jittery tree leaves
Like the West Wind
Racing to fetch the stick
I’ve thrown so high and far
But the stick lies still
Where it has fallen.
(c) Mike Stone
from https://uncollectedworks.wordpress.com/yet-another-book-of-poetry/
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💗
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“Tears and Toys”
(Raanana, January 31, 2013)
A poem is sometimes like a joke
Except instead of being funny
It’s so sad your heart leaps out of your chest
And you look around to see whether anyone else saw that
But they never do.
I once read a poem about my dead dog Chewy
How I buried her with my tears and her toys
Only I didn’t say her name or that she was a dog.
Some people came up to me afterward, a man and a woman,
And she told me how they appreciated my poem
Because they had buried their daughter too
With their tears and her toys.
Then I told them the punch-line
That my poem was about my dog Chewy
(I loved her so)
Because honesty’s the best policy.
The woman winced once, I think,
And then a curtain came down
Hiding their faces from me.
Now and then I hear laughter
And I look around
But don’t see any joke being told.
He seems to slap his knees at our sorrows.
Sometimes I get all mixed up about
Who’s God
And who’s the poet
And who’s burying their dead love
With their tears and her toys.
(c) Mike Stone
from https://uncollectedworks.wordpress.com/yet-another-book-of-poetry/
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😔
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“Worry”
(Raanana, June 21, 2013)
What if they don’t come home?
I’ve been standing on the couch
I don’t know how long
Looking out the window …
What if they don’t come home?
Their cars aren’t there,
The black one or the brown one,
What if they don’t …?
It’s quiet and I’m so lonely –
What if …?
Nobody will give me water
And nobody will give me food
And nobody will love me
And nobody will come.
Don’t they know what could happen
When they say goodbye to me?
What if they don’t come home?
I’ll lie down to sleep
I don’t know how long.
At least I won’t think about
What if they don’t come home,
But I can’t sleep because
What if they don’t come home?
Don’t they know what I think?
Don’t they care?
If they only knew
How impossible it is to think like this
They’d never leave me.
What if they don’t come home?
Please come back … now.
What if they don’t come home?
(c) Mike Stone
from https://uncollectedworks.wordpress.com/yet-another-book-of-poetry/
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😥
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“The Service Revolver”
(Raanana, May 22, 2009)
Sixty-six pounds of snarling anger
In the only path to safety
For six pounds of cold fear.
A chain squeezes suddenly around the honey-colored throat
And the anger moves on,
At first reluctantly, and then
Loping along at a goodly pace
Wet nostrils flared and quivering,
Ready to sift and scoop up
Anything of taste or interest
Along the dark and lamp-lit way.
Walking my dog Daisy
Whose name belies her vigor and strength
Barely controlled by a pact initialed
But never formally ratified,
She leads me through the valley of my loneliness
Which I measure in the scrape and echo
Of footsteps having no place to go.
Walking under an archway of sparse leaved bracken
And thick limbs of eucalyptus
Thoughts swarm around us
In no particular rhyme or meter,
Like the personal black hole
Pulling me towards an eventual horizon
In gossamer strands of infinity,
And another: at what point in our lives
Does it become reasonable
To contemplate suicide,
To feel the coolness and weight of one’s service revolver
Against the weight of continuing to be?
(c) Mike Stone
from https://uncollectedworks.wordpress.com/the-uncollected-works-of-mike-stone/
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“Chewy”
(Raanana, February 4, 2007)
I have a riddle for you:
‘When is a house empty, even though it’s full of people?’
She had more names than God Himself.
We should have called her Uhuru—
Freedom was the one thing she loved more than us
And finally she’s escaped the soft clutches of our love.
In our eagerness and innocence
We brought her home too soon
To be weaned from her mother,
A frightened little thing
No bigger than my fist.
She grew to love us though,
As fiercely as we loved her.
Some people were scared of her
But we’d give anything
For her to warm herself against us.
Last night her little heart burst its bounds
And she escaped her life
Running free at last through open fields
Photographed by death.
This morning when we buried her,
It rained cats and dogs.
(c) Mike Stone
from https://uncollectedworks.wordpress.com/the-uncollected-works-of-mike-stone/
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💕
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Although I love all animals, I tend more to the practical dog, than the practical cat ;-). I look for some dog poems.
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We had practical dogs too. 👍♥️👏
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Hi Jamie,
My second response:
Coincidence
Every morning our tabby
sits beside the grave
beside the wall
of her black predecessor
Our lass and I joke
she is speaking
to her ‘grandma’
My Nana hates cats
who leave “messages”
in her garden
Don’t know how
people can live
with cat hair…
disgusting how people
let them walk
on surfaces.
She never visits us.
Cat and Nana never meet.
Their senses fail
at the same time.
Eyes, ears, mouth.
Something tells me
not long after our cat
goes Nana will too.
Arrivee from work
our cat rigor mortis stiff
across her armchair.
Three days later
I get a phone call
Nana has fallen.
I sit beside her
hospital bedside.
Arrive home to find
a new tabby cat
who asks me
to stroke her
in the way our
black cat did.
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Hi Jamie,
Here’s my first response:
The Gift
A small dark shape on kitchen tile
stared over by our cat,
Move closer. it is a sparrow bairn,
whose chest balloons out as my sigh releases.
Scooped up, as I take it out to the garden.
It stands on the plastic lip.
Over the fence our neighbour stands in hunched
dark tears “My mam won’t be coming out of hospital”
My breath caught.
The sparrow flies away.
(From my second forthcoming pamphlet to be published in England probably later this year)
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.little dog gone.
oh you were so very small
hash tag
not a proper dog
was said.
oh you were good company
hash tag
not like a human
was said.
oh boy on a good day how you
would run.
hash tag.
more like scampering
was said and overheard.
little dog gone.
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😔
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This should be fun! 😊🌹
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I hope so. 👍
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