Tag: poetry
A couplet my brain made
And somehow in the richest nations there’s still places where the kids are starving-poor
Yet in the barren wastelands some save their last water for the stranger at the door
I feel weird taking credit for this one. It jumped into my head fully formed, more like remembering a song you’ve heard or a dream you just had than writing something. But it expresses something important about the world. I don’t usually write couplets, so that’s weird too, but it is what it is.
R.I.P. Nikki
My best friend’s cat Nikki just died. Nikki was an amazing cat, and very complicated and hard to sum up easily. She was a lot like Fey in parts of her personality and body language, but Fey was a Gryffindor and Nikki was a Slytherin, for whatever reason. She was, to my knowledge, 17, the same age as Fey when she died.
My favorite thing Anne ever wrote about her was Nikki the Guarding Cat. There’s also Meet the Cats: Nikki.
She always lived her own way, and died her own way, fortunately peacefully while unconscious, despite it being bowel cancer. She seemed to be in less and less pain towards the end, which is oddly how my father experienced his death from cancer. (Not what you’d expect, but it happens. He had no pain the last two weeks of his life, he said it just vanished and never came back.)
She was in many YouTube videos like these, with Brodie (who is Hufflepuff to the core):
He was the first of the younger cats (a trio of formerly feral littermates) to be able to approach her because his social skills are amazing and he gave her the respect she commanded. (She always acted a little like royalty and expected to be treated as such.)
Brodie actually, while she was dying, mirrored her movements for 20 minutes one night, almost as if to show her that he’d be able to take over guard duty when she was gone and she didn’t have to worry about that.
All the other three cats (Coraline, Brodie, and Shadow) clustered around her and kept watch while she was dying.
Anyway, the only poem I can offer in tribute to her is by Longfellow, “The Light of Stars”:
I would indeed beware of Nikki. A cat who can never be summed up no matter what you do. May she rest in peace.
Thirsty
I’ve learned to sustain myself
In tiny drops of water
From oases so small
They’re invisible
To the naked eye
You flow over jagged rocks
Like a mountain spring
That reminds me
I’ve forgotten how
To be thirsty