@kengaroo - your response made me happy to have 'taken the plunge' today to devote an hour of my life to HotCopper and my friends on here - so much still to do in my home - as my gardener has disappeared and I won't find another one for the price (and quality) but he probably just took in his 'shingle' - so I'll be doing physical work round here for the next month or so -
You say so many true things in your post - I have always found solace in music, initially in the actual execution of - singing and playing piano, both skills are on the back burner at the moment. I have been writing for many years - not in any serious way, but doing stories for club magazines, actually editing and producing a bi-lingual club magazine for years (try translating an interesting English-language story into 'wordy' German and make it fit the same space) , doing stories for a weekly, half-hour, radio show for 6 years, writing a few speeches for one of my bosses (which he duly ignored, but he used the outline) drafting his mail etc. etc..
I have also written on the political threads of some fora (forums?) - even on here, but found one is talking to deaf ears and the mind gone AWOL - so have given up. I have learnt a lot, though, by listening to and analysing what other people have to say on subjects which I hold dear and near and - hopefully - have learnt tolerance and ingested new information.
My 'tiger' poems is quite simple: I had a beautiful orange/ginger tom cat, rather 'we' when we were still a whole family - and he outlived his Master by 1/2 year - one day I returned from work and a neighbour asked me if I owned a ginger cat - I said yes and he pointed to where he lay - dead! I took him home and buried him in a beautiful silk shawl under my husband's olive tree. (Half a year before Hubby had said 'good-by' to me, obliquely, under that tree - he had found an empty birds nest and called me out to show it to me - 15 hours later he had died - my life is full of symbolic 'stuff')
The strange thing though was, firstly, ginger Tom had a ritualised way of acknowledging me in the morning and evening: but the evening before he had come up to me for his usual pat in the evening and was particularly clingy - unusual for him, as he was a rather 'matter-of-fact' kind of cat, a cat which, despite being de-sexed (and bell round his neck) still roamed and, I am sure, intimidated other toms, and he did go around harrassing people's birds, got shot at at one stage, had to wear an eye-patch and from then on we called him 'Moshe Dayan' (named after the Israeli General with the eye patch) - still he roamed but I managed to reign him in most evenings, simply by feeding them at night (I had 2 cats, 3 at one stage) and they would come in.
So a much loved character - not just a cat - a proud and handsome male of a different kind . . . .
And now he was dead - I was devastated, had just managed to stop my daily 'bucket of tears' on coming home (offering to my dead husband) - and here he was, my golden Tom, our golden Tom - dead - most likely from biting a poisoned rat or mouse . so I buried him, cried and wrote a poem;
Midnight is gone
and yet I wake and hear the tinkling of a bell,
although the bell is clothed in swathes of indigo and yellow silk,
the bell that hung and swung from a once soft-yellow neck.
beneath the olive tree the earth is bare
dug by my hands a special flower bed like many I have dug this week
yet this one will no flower bear
because the flower is already there.
the mouth adorned with whiskered tendrils
the whitest breast and gloves of white
a plume of red-soft-orange, eyes of purest gold:
this is the flower that the earth does hold.
my gentle, greeting friend, so much alike the other
who strode the earth with gliding cat-like grace
who loved the earth and everything it holds in simple ways - like you
and left the world like you - with swift adieus;
... just stepping out - no long good-byes for you
to make the moment last, to stretch the life
the purest, sweetest, loving life of purring softness
of gentle stretch and pump of claws in flesh and skin and woollen dress
remembering the softness of a mother's breast.
...remembering the mother of a different breed
'species' as Darwin would have said
who human mothers puts to shame by purring through her labour's pain
and giving birth, purrs ceaselessly
until her child is born and washed and fed.
You purred the last night of your life
and I just wondered - not remembering the man
who made His last day beautiful by pleasing others
and making light of his own fear and pain.
'Tiger' he called you - on His last day
and I shall think of you that way and know
that you will meet again
the man who gave this honourable name.
I thank you for your life and love - and weep -
and wish that you had lived some more
but know when death's blind date knocks on the door
it is a date we have to keep!
I
n memory of Min-Min, a golden ginger tom cat, who died of unknown
cause 1/2 year after his Master's death.
Taurisk
