Flying Mice
The city is full of urban sparrows,
A hundred to each tree –
Flocking under the tourists’ feet
And dicing cars along the street.
They steal the food from off the barrows,
And ride the trams for free,
Nesting anywhere they can grab
In any old wall or concrete slab.
Finding their hedgerows far too narrow,
They seek opportunity –
When it’s just too dry for rainy pigeons,
Up-pop sparrows with ambitions.
Rhinos In Name Only
Somewhere, in a parallel taiga,
There they are – they never died.
The woolly rhinos guard the Eiger,
Symbols of the Russian pride.
Standing ground against the polar bear,
And hauling Santa’s sleigh,
And touring with the country fair –
In brown and never grey –
But not this Earth, and not this tundra –
So it goes, and so they went –
The climate changed and they went under,
Leaving bones from Greece to Kent.
Their naked cousins still exist, I guess,
Though less divine –
We won’t find them near Inverness
Or swimming in the Rhine.
Urban Pilgrims
“Nobody owns a pet in Istanbul, they just befriend the local strays.”
– The Local Planet Guide
The dogs are stays and tramps and ferals,
Picking scraps, surviving perils,
Living in gaps on tufts of ground –
Though the locals seem to like them hanging round.
But who knows what diseases lurk,
And how much needed council work
To catch and spay and then release ?
Is that why vagrant number still increase ?
They may look cute in tourist spots,
But less so in the poorer lots –
Traffic-tangling, always breeding –
Some look starved, but overall succeeding.
We wonder where the pups are hidden,
As they lounge around, unbidden.
Have they fleas ? We’d best not breach –
So stroking-wise, they’re just out of our reach.
And now official policy
Has moved to stop them roaming free,
To round them up and put them down
To kick the mange and rabies out of town.
But then there are the feral cats
About the mosques and laundromats –
They’re just as cute and just as cherished,
But they’re far less likely to be perished.
They too are mating uncontrolled,
But always act as good as gold
Just lazing round the grand bazaars,
Despite their secret ticks and worms and scars.
The Magnolia Jungle
Indoor cats grow fat
About the flat,
From all their lack of pace –
They spend all morning sat
Upon the mat,
Just cleaning fur and face.
Then mooch-in for a chat,
Or stroke and pat,
As though they own the place –
And sleep upon a hat,
Or idly bat
The drapes with easy grace,
They’ve got it far too soft and easy,
Never getting cold or sneezy,
Staring out the windows, queasy,
At the thought of empty space.
Hiding from the wet and breezy,
Doing as they damn well pleasy
Till they’re corpulent and wheezy,
Hiding in their cushy base.
Indoor cats grow fat,
Without a rat,
To give them cause to chase –
But they don’t care for that,
They run this flat –
Or prowl, in any case…
White Whiskers
Cats love milk, everyone knows it,
Even the cats know it’s true –
All of common culture shows it,
Cats just love the moo !
Since Aesop told the ancient Greeks,
The white has dyed the wool –
As ever since, our folklore speaks of it
By the saucers-full
Except…they can’t digest it,
No, not even when it’s creamed –
They’re done with being breast-fed
Since there kitten-selves were weaned.
And yet, the tales are prominent
Throughout the milky West –
I guess we lactose-tolerants
Think good-old breast is best !
But blame for this situation
Is not ours alone, at that –
For this dangerous temptation
Is such catnip to a cat.
For moggies won’t learn the lesson,
As they glut with ev’ry lap,
Not knowing how they’re messing
With a lit’ral booby trap.
Pastoral Symphony
The countryside is sometimes all a chorus of its own,
With the songbird sky-sopranos saying grace –
And the yapping dogs’ falsetto, and the tomcats’ mezzo tone,
And the hens and pigeons make an alto brace.
The sheep are then the tenor, the pigs are baritone,
While the cows are mooing low down in the bass,
And underlying ev’rything, the bees provide the drone,
While the clip-clop hooves of horses beat the pace.
And finally, the donkey starts, a soloist alone –
She’s the braying primadonna of the place !
The Prayer in the Purr
What do cats dream,
Those tabbies, napping in the Sun all day ?
Are they getting cream,
Or perhaps they fighting with a scar-clawed stray ?
Does it scratch their itch,
Or raise a threat that’s coming out to creep ?
Ev’ry time they twitch,
Are they trembling from a nightmare stalking sleep ?
A cat has no other cats to call for mental health,
It’s up to them alone to learn to wake themself.
Is that why they sleep when the Sun is shining stark ?
As if they’re too afraid to have to lie there in the dark ?
What do we dream,
We humans, snoring to the Moon all night ?
Cheering on our team,
Or racing through our minds from guilt and fright ?
So is it so odd,
If felines fear, and maybe find some faith ?
If cats have a god,
I hope she’s keeping well her clowder safe.
So when they come to humans, just to join us on our bed,
And even though we partly know they’re looking to be fed –
Yet just for a moment, we feel it feel so deep,
As if they’re seeking comfort here to calm their troubled sleep.
Cats in Progress
A cat may be a hairless sphinx,
Or taleless Manx, or beefy Coon –
But most are more a mini-lynx,
That have no need to tweak or jinx
That classic shape of ancient minx,
That slinks beneath the Moon.
The Siamese design is striking,
But it is a custom frame.
The common tabby has been hiking
Through our lands, and through our liking –
Kept by Pharaoh, Greek, or Viking,
Looking much the same.
But maybe, underneath that fur,
A change is slowly going on.
As certain traits succeed, and spur
A rise in smarts behind the purr –
They’re not the loners once they were
In ancient Babylon.
We humans chuckle, and pretend
That cats will do just as they suit –
But truth is, they still sculpt and bend,
Through generations without end,
To suit our need to be our friend –
And learn how to be cute.
Afterpour
The mud is underfoot again,
The garden paths awash with grime –
But now the sky has stopped the rain,
It must be snail time.
The birds are nowhere to be seen,
The leaves are dripping from the lime –
And yet, the air is fresh and clean –
It must be snail time.
They come out of their hiding,
Sliding over puddles millimetres deep,
While wearing their umbrellas –
Soggy dwellers on their slow and silent sweep.
Where do they shade when the Sun is out ?
Where do they hunker in the drought ?,
While waiting for the showers
That empowers them to wake up from their sleep.
The worms are up upon the lawn,
The garden ants are on the climb,
The clouds are brightening, like dawn –
It must be snail time.
Floating Arums
Walking along the canal,
I see the duckweed is in bloom –
Bank-to-bank, a carpet
For the mallards’ living room.
The moorhens leave a wake of clear
That slowly zips together,
The swans have clumps upon their prows,
And flecks on ev’ry feather.
Rivers are no good, of course,
They hurry up their flow –
But out on the canal,
It teaches how to take it slow.
The coots are scooping mouthfuls,
And the geese are busy working –
But beneath the green and stillness,
I can sense there’s something lurking…
Rhyming Couplets 