Bad Poetry: Ten-Line Obituary

At the Substack I had pre-posted a cheerful silly poem about this week's weather. The first real cold front of winter produced only scattered patches of frost "in the higher elevations." Usually that phrase in the weather forecast means "not at the Cat Sanctuary," but we are a few feet above sea level (water boils at 217 or 218 degrees on a Fahrenheit thermometer, not 212) and the leaves that turn color in cold weather turned this week. In the towns the leaves were still green. I'm guessing they saw color this morning, though, because my thermometer was down just below the freezing mark this morning.

The other news was not so cheerful. It popped out of my head in this form when I looked at the Poets & Storytellers United prompt for poems "to the power of ten."

Ten little eyes that never will open,

Twenty wee paws that never will run;

Five tiny Seralini kittens,

None lasted through the night, not one.

In the warm room their mother laid them

In the warm spot, right on the mat.

Warmth was no use to them, nor milk either;

They were born only to cleanse the cat.

I heard them squeak in the night to say,

"We never came into this world to stay."

Researchers, one of whom was called Seralini, determined that exposure to glyphosate and apparently some other toxic chemicals causes some females, of all species, to sequester these chemicals in non-viable embryonic offspring. The mothers show no reactions except that, if they give birth to living young, these babies aren't able to live very long. Women who have this trait have gone on record saying that they would rather have been sick themselves than lost their babies. Other animals don't seem happy about it either--but they do survive, and thrive. If they're not exposed to "pesticide" (why did I start to type "petsicide"?) vapors before or during their next pregnancy, they may have healthy babies later.