The feral cat
Fresh blood dripping from your snarling mouthyour shoulders bunched, spine high-archedyou glared angrily at me as I drove past in my car.
Icon of primeval hunter, you crouched by the roadsideteeth burgeoning in crushing, crunching jawstearing flesh from a fresh-killed victim with razor claws.
Boldness imaged your new freedomin an expanding heart that lustedsolely to hunt ... stalk ... kill prey.
You are growing wiserstronger ... faster ... wilder.
But no-one seems to care as you acceleratethe ethnic cleansing of endangered species.
Man captured you four millennia agothen genetically re-programmed youto be a Temple guardian.
Once a feared predator, Woman softened youto become a furry thing that purrsthen silent, sits upright in windows.
With fresh blood in your mouth you are no longer CAThouse-trained to please, now you kill wantonlyrevel in the fear you invoke in others.
In this wide, old land filled with soft-skin fauna you waitbrutalising towards your earlier shape where unfencedNational Parks provide a space to kill, free you to become.
Man was created, just like you to run free in the killing-fieldscalled 'War', where we can become unrepentant predators?
Is this what God meant you to be?To revert to what you once were?
As we lust for more power and grow wiser, strongerfaster, wilder and less inhibited, do we revert like youand not redeem the better qualities of soul we aspire?
Karl H. Cameron-Jackson
Last of the cat poems
Please, not another cat poemno more couplets for cuddly companionsunless to recount the leftover birds which litter the lawnwhilst puss sits inside with blood on his clawsand purrs satisfaction
I plead with you desist from that paean to pussy palshipsave to summon up that stench in the yardwhich neighbourhood moggies love to bombardwith tom spray and cat shit
I beg of you no more veneration of feline affectionbut to catalogue each Australian creaturewhich through cat predation wobbles and teeterson the edge of extinction
I implore you, no more tributes to Tabby Tom and Persian Cleoexcept to decry the midnight caterwaulingthe screeches, the wails, the quarrels appallingbelow my bedroom window
Not more T. S. Eliot like whimsical narrationunless to promote the wearing of flat cat hatswith fur flaps and tails which help to combatthe proliferating kitty population
No, no not even a moggie haikuuntil we bid the last cat in Australia farewellwith a tolling not a tinkling bella ding dong