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Poetry for Cat Lovers

February 17, 2013 / 18 Comments
If you love cats, sharing makes us purrrr :-)

Feeling the winter doldrums? We have a few items to bring cheer. We’re happy to announce the lucky winners of our giveaway for two autographed copies of Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper arelove saves the day-gwen cooper-novel-cats-interview

Fur Everywhere and Connie. Congratulations! Look for an email from Layla and Cat Wisdom 101.

I’m currently reading a new publicist sent book, Animal Wise by Virginia Morell and will be published on February 26, 2013. It’s so engrossing, I didn’t want to rush the review and giveaway. It can wait until next week. Meanwhile, I can’t wait for spring. How are your pets amusing you today?

guilty-pleasure-cat-puppy-cute-funny

One of my favorite poems, February by the Canadian queen of literature, Margaret Atwood, magically weaves cats and winter. For eight years I lived a couple blocks away from Ms. Atwood’s Toronto home but only met her once at the grocery story when I gave her a quarter. In those days grocery carts required a quarter to release the cart from their lock. If you wanted your quarter back meant jamming the cart back into the locking mechanism. She passed me pushing her empty cart. “I’ll take that for you,” I said and offered her a quarter. She took it and smiled. I never knew if it was out of politeness or recognizing a fellow cat lover with telltale cat hair on our clothes.

 

February

 

BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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18 Comments

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  • CATachresis

    February 17, 2013 at 3:52 PM Reply

    …breathing his breath
    of burped-up meat and musty sofas…

    very quotable !! mol

    The imagery is purrfect! I have never read Atwood to my shame, but I know she has won many awards for her work! Austin is inspecting his “small pink bumhole” as I write!!! x

  • Skeeter and Izzy

    February 17, 2013 at 11:07 AM Reply

    Lovely,just lovely…..It is a typical Febuary day here,cold,snowy,blustery…and cats rushing out then back in to nap peacefully for a while.
    Concats to the winners!
    Luv Skeeter and Izzy >^..^<

  • Sparky Spitfire

    February 17, 2013 at 8:44 AM Reply

    Oh! How I love Ms. Atwood! She has this way of drilling into your brain so you just never forget some of her imagery. I remember reading this, what? ages ago – and that burping greedy cat with it’s “small pink bumhole” has been so clear in my mind I sometimes mistake it for a cat I once owned. Thanks for finding this again for me.

  • Ms. Phoebe

    February 17, 2013 at 4:24 AM Reply

    My Mom/slave/human has read some of Ms. Atwood’s books and had no idea she was from Canada. We love this poem and have never read it before, thank mew Auntie Layla for an always interesting read and enlightening one’s mind to new things that help to enrich it. One’s mind especially needs the stimulation during these dreary months, where it otherwise wants to hibernate and function on auto-pilot.
    I am speaking on behalf of my Mom here, as my mind is always alert and ready to pounce- even if I’m hibernating! MEWHAHAHA!

  • Kathryn

    February 17, 2013 at 1:39 AM Reply

    So beautiful I am crying. She is the queen of all literaire canadienne.

    My second published book review, ever, was Survival by Margaret Atwood, in the Montreal Gazette. (Dancing Girls was in it, too), in a review I wrote in 75.

    And to this day, I still think of how she describes that in most countries, the main story is man v man. In Canada, the story is always the same: man v nature.

    She also described how, each summer, she and her parents would take to the woods, sans nylons and razors, living in the wild. Come September, they’d pack the razors and the nylons, and her mom would wear skirts and heels and makeup and back to the city. It made Margaret sad, to go back to the city, after her Toronto summers.

    Another story she described was how at Harvard, she went to Filene’s Basement (this was five years before I moved to Boston, and was the first time I heard of Filene’s basement) – she bought herself an overcoat, a bit big, but it meant so much to her, – and what it meant, I don’t remember, but like the other two vague reminiscences I’ve described here, she weaves something intangible but pastry like in that it melts on your tongue, and you want it forever…

    I will have to come back to finish sampling this new Atwood pastry, the cat.

    I lived near Aberdeen. I don’t remember using any quarters for Loblaws.

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