Grave Digging
Bent double, coughing,
Like the old hag, I know I am,
Now that you’re dead.
Beneath the black elder tree
Where the Wisteria vine
Grows up, hangs down.
You were bought
As a gift for my daughter
Out of guilt,
For packing her off to boarding school,
After twelve years
Of home ed.
You got exactly three years more of that,
Than she,
The cat’s mother.
I've been dreaming of no more stinking piss, on floors,
Antique settees, sans fleas.
Tears, drip, merge with rain,
I’m trying not to puke into the grave,
In vain,
Hysteria grows up
Bursts out, calms down.
You learned to control yours,
I must control mine.
No coffin for the last cat
I didn’t try too hard to save.
But a little, shrunken grey
Cashmere pully washed away
To a fraction of its size,
As you were, at the end,
Old friend.
Its arms embrace you in eternal sleep,
As paws once embraced mine,
But the woolly has no claws,
Will not purr as it slits you open,
Will not clamp its vice like jaws.
And a blue towel to hide you from my eyes
As I start to cover you in soil.
And realise,
Though deep,
I haven’t dug quite wide enough
And the phrase
“Too narrow breadth for naught”
Pops into my head
And I try to think instead, of Simpkin,
And his misdeeds and flaws.
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