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Queen Jemima

· Cats,Haiku

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

broken image

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