Today’s FHS Poem of the Day is about cats. If we have met, it may surprise you that it has taken me this long to include a poem dedicated to my soft, noisy companions.

There are some fantastic poems about cats. One of my favourites is Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno‘, an eighteenth-century celebration of a cat called Jeoffry. Margaret Atwood wrote a rather terrifying piece called ‘February‘, in which she acknowledges that cats are, after all, predators. The French critic Jacques Derrida used his cat as the main example in his famous essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, which explores the ways in which we gaze at animals, and they gaze back at us. When we write about animals, it seems we have to acknowledge both our mutual affection and the wide gap between our species.

Like Thom Gunn, the writer of the poem I settled on, I have two cats, who also have white bibs and live in an apartment. I have to admit I, too, refer to them as ‘The Girls’. His description of their contained, but intense lived experience is spot on. His short lines of irregular length seem to mimic their changeable moods, and he deploys semicolons deftly to contain all their minute different actions within the same sentence.

In poetry, we inhabit the mind of another being – and because poetry allows for gaps and ambiguity, we can even do so in an almost purely sensory way. Gunn does not ask us to figure out why his cats (like mine often do) suddenly ‘Wheel, gallop’ through the hallway, but his language makes me feel like I might give it a go, myself.

Apartment Cats

Thom Gunn

The Girls wake, stretch, and pad up to the door.

They rub my leg and purr;

One sniffs around my shoe,

Rich with an outside smell,

The other rolls back on the floor –

White bib exposed, and stomach of soft fur.

Now, more awake, they re-enact Ben Hur

Along the corridor,

Wheel, gallop; as they do,

Their noses twitching still,

Their eyes get wild, their bodies tense,

Their usual prudence seemingly withdraws.

And then they wrestle; parry, lock of paws,

Blind hug of close defense,

Tail-thump, and smothered mew.

If either, though, feels claws,

She abruptly rises, knowing well

How to stalk off in wise indifference.