Dog Tags
The names of dogs shall change and flex,
With the rise and fall of Gus and Rex,
As their names are called around the lido –
Though these days, no-one calls Fido.
Folks in the park are a diverse lot,
And so are their dogs – but none is Spot.
Some names, it seems, are truly over –
Hello Lola, goodbye Rover.
The Elephants of War
The jumbos joined the battlefield,
To put the steeds to fright.
For what use were mere horses
In the face of so much might ?
But the other side were not done yet,
This wouldn’t be a rout –
They launched their secret weapon
As they rode their mammoths out.
So the jumbos and the mammoths
Clashed upon the battlefield –
They flared their ears and trumpeted,
And neither side would yield.
They reared-up on their hind legs high,
They broadsided and barged,
And they shook the ground beneath them
As their ten-ton leaders charged.
But what with all their bellowing
To war and kingdom-come,
It soon become apparent
That these hunks were not so dumb –
They targetted the riders,
Pulled them off with probing trunks,
And skewered them upon their tusks,
And flayed them into chunks.
They stamped upon the humans,
And they kicked them from their path,
Till they were the last ones standing
In the bloody aftermath.
And they touched their heads together in a truce,
And sallied forth –
With the jumbos on to Africa,
And mammoths heading North.
Gallybaggers
How do scarecrows scare crows ?
Who knows ?
They seem such feeble foes.
Do they even work, do you suppose ?
With their hessian nose and wooden toes,
These crucified guards in hand-me-down clothes
Must scare the birds that thieve he rows.
But corbs are smart, and their learning shows
As they crop the crops while their wardens doze…
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 neighbourhood 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 their 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 mogs won’t learn the lesson,
As they glut with ev’ry lap,
Never knowing how they’re messing
With a lit’ral booby trap.
The reference to Aesop is a bit of a cheat, since his fable The Litigious Cats centres on a dispute over a piece of cheese rather than milk – but cheese is just as unstable to felines, so I reckon it counts…
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.
Rhyming Couplets 