I must share with you again something from Henry Beard’s Poetry for Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse.
I love the prodigious imagination at work in this little book: the exuberant love of both poetry and cats, and the way that Beard is able to evoke the original poem while making it something utterly… well, cat-like.
It’s a cool thing about people. We just love to put things together in new and interesting ways. We like to create resonances between things we love, whether it’s parties with friends or pop culture references in books. We like to look at the clouds and say, I see a bunny. We like to dance with strangers at rock concerts. And some of us like to read hommages written ostensibly by poets’ cats.
Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s a cat-lovin’ poetry-readin’ human Saturday kind of thing, and that’s all there it to it.
Treed
by Joyce Kilmer’s Cat
I think that I shall never see
A poem nifty as a tree.
A tree whose rugged trunk seems meant
To speed a happy cat’s ascent;
A tree that laughs at dogs all day
And serves up baby birds for prey;
A tree whose limbs are in the sky
Where clandestinely I can spy;
Until it does upon me dawn
It is a mile down to the lawn.
Poems are made by cats like me,
But only you can get me off this goddam stupid tree.
— from Poetry For Cats by Henry Beard.
And you know what else I like about people? That we’ll help each other down from the goddam stupid tree every once in a while. It’s one of the great human things.