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Cat Lady

She’s outside calling the cat again – Flora, Flora

she named it Flora as it arrive in her garden

wriggled in between flower beds through a hole

in the fence.  It was a female, white with tan and

black markings, soft as a ball of wool

 

She cuddled it, fed it until spying the dog it mewed

pitifully and she had to release it back to the street.

On holiday in Barcelona, Rome, Nairobi, she feeds

stray cats from restaurant tables, birds too she throws

them morsels, smiles and coos as they flutter, hop, grab

 

It’s compassion she claims, when she was a young

mother she divorced her abusive husband, fled with

two young children to Sri Lanka where she fell in love

with pottery.  In heat of creative passion she sent the

children to an orphanage where they grew up strangers

speaking a foreign language, who looked at her

with downcast eyes on her infrequent visits

 

Flora, she calls, Flora, and from the bushes that

flank the fence two different cats arrive, wet, fur

matted, green eyed, they gobble the food she puts out

and then bound off back to some dustbin refuge

 

She’s going to cage them, take them to a vet, have

them spayed, castrated.  She buys a superior brand

of cat food at the local store.  Flora will be back she

thinks and then I’ll tame her, make her mine.

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© Johnmichael Simon

2012

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