I Lern about Po-et-try

Musashi Sez:

So mom sed, “Musashi, do yu noe what po-et-try is?”
An I sed, “No, I don’t. Kin yu eat it?”
An she sed, “Not so much. Yu read it or yu write it. Like spelling.”
An I sed, “Is it like lolcats?”
An she sed, “Sort of, but without the pictures.”
So I sed, “Kin yu show me one fer mai blog?”

So here is a po-et-try about cats. It’s by MARGE PIERCY who is awsum like a cat, an who has lived wift lots of cats, fer years an years, an has wrote lots of po-et-try. She gets 2 stars.

The Cat’s Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my toy, my slave, my friend, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow in my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come, I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak fear with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.


Mom Explains:

This poem is from Marge Piercy’s book, Mars and Her Children, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Go buy it.