The National Poetry Writing Month challenge for the 9th of April is to write a poem in the "voice" of an animal or plant. The poems chosen for inspiration were by Marianne Moore, who pioneered the concept of creating "poems" by choosing a pattern of syllables and repeating it, but I happened to have written a "poem" in the voice of an animal that I hadn't posted here yet.
In the Bible, Jesus sometimes uses a word that's translated as "judge" in King James' English, but the word seems to have meant "set a standard by which others are judged." "We shall judge angels," not necessarily in the sense that we will be seated around the Great White Throne as a jury, more likely in the sense that angels will be told "These mere mortals have done better than you've done."
Watching my cat Serena cherish a kitten who never came into this world to stay, I have wondered how many women the cat might be said, in this sense, to "judge." I'm not here to judge women who think they need abortion, but I have wondered...Nothing could have made the kitten viable. He had a genetic inability to eat solid food. After growing too big to live on milk alone, he starved to death in the midst of plenty. But he was loved. Even by his uncle--and not everyone lives to see a tomcat show any concern for another tomcat's kitten!
Cats can and do abort kittens if things go wrong--if the mother cat is injured, or has a high fever, or is chilled. Though she spent the Big Freeze indoors, last winter, and seemed comfortable, Serena went out in the snow just beginning to show pregnancy, stayed as long as she felt like staying, and came in hollow-sided. Still, I wonder whether social cats could understand the idea of aborting or abandoning a healthy baby just because its color, sex, or even disability, don't fit into a mental picture of how the family ought to look.
My son is black as he can be.
His half-tail is turned under.
(My son and I are cats, you see.)
I dote on him, and wonder:
I've heard that human women will
Give up a child who's Black
If that's not their mates' color, or
If some excess or lack
Is found in fetal body parts.
How that's found, I don't know.
Or if it's daughter, if it's son--
Why should that matter so?
My son is precious as can be.
For him I'd fight or die.
About these women, I can't see
Why?
Photo from Google, which says it's from TikTok. These aren't my cats. Google has dozens of photos of "calico cat with black kitten"; this was the one that clearly showed the cat "mothering" the kitten.
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