A couple of verses:
My tired eyes
Four AM, a snoring cat
Her scratching shakes the bed
Night time ebbs away
Curled up on my bed she snores
Jemima the Queen
The irony is that this pussy does not, in mundane human legal terms, belong to us. Although I certainly consider myself owned by her.
She’s a small local tabby who has adopted us. From time to time her Homo Sapiens owner knocks at our door, “Is she here? I haven’t seen her for weeks, but I’ve seen her scratching on your door…?”
Normally at that moment Jemima will be comatose on our sofa.
She transits in and out of the house constantly, has her own food bowl and towel bed. She moves around so freely that I can never pronounce definitively on her presence without glancing at the sofa first.
At 4am I expect to be woken and to have to stand patiently on the cold floor tiles by the kitchen sink, while Jemima drinks from the dripping tap. I’ll check her bowl then let her out the front, only to be woken a short while later, after the completion of a patrol around the house, by frantic scratching at the back door.
A final, non-feline, haiku. I wrote this while sitting outside a cafe at Milton Keynes shopping centre, watching the birds deal with recently-vacated tables:
Cafe, pastry crumbs
Cheerful darting under tables
Hungry sparrows here
