In Memory of Max, my "kissing kitty"

Max was buried yesterday, after 12 good and full years of life. He was the most affectionate of my three cats and he will be missed. He was "Maximiliano el Emperador de Mexico," a title given by a Mexican friend who thought the cat deserved a dignified name. Over time, it was shortened to Max.

This poem, by an unknown author, is dedicated to him.

Poem For Cats

And God asked the feline spirit
Are you ready to come home?
Oh, yes, quite so, replied the precious soul
And, as a cat, you know I am most able
To decide anything for myself.

Are you coming then? asked God.
Soon, replied the whiskered angel
But I must come slowly
For my human friends are troubled
For you see, they need me, quite certainly.

But don't they understand? asked God
That you'll never leave them?
That your souls are intertwined. For all eternity?
That nothing is created or destroyed?
It just is....forever and ever and ever.

Eventually they will understand,
Replied the glorious cat
For I will whisper into their hearts
That I am always with them
I just am....forever and ever and ever.

Related reading: D. Sayers' The Final Redemption of Cats

Another Cat Poem

To A Cat

Stately, kindly, lordly friend
Condescend
Here to sit by me, and turn
Glorious eyes that smile and burn,
Golden eyes, love's lustrous meed,
On the golden page I read.

All your wondrous wealth of hair
Dark and fair,
Silken-shaggy, soft and bright
As the clouds and beams of night,
Pays my reverent hand's caress
Back with friendlier gentleness.

Dogs may fawn on all and some
As they come;
You, a friend of loftier mind,
Answer friends alone in kind.
Just your foot upon my hand
Softly bids it understand.

--A. C. Swinburne

The Final Redemption of Cats

For Timothy, in the Coinherence
Dorothy Sayers

“Tutti tirati sono, e tutti tirano” –
(Paradiso xxviii, 129)

Consider, O Lord, Timothy, Thy servants’ servant.
(We give him this title, as to Thy servant the Pope,
Not knowing a better. Him too Thy ministers were
observant
To vest in white and adorn with a silk cope.)

Thy servant lived with Thy servants in the exchange
Of affection; he condescended to them from the
dignity
Of an innocent mind; they bent to him with benignity
From the rarefied Alps of their intellectual range.

Hierarchy flourished, with no resentment
For the unsheathed claw or the hand raised in
correction;
Small wild charities took root beneath the Protection,
Garden-escapes from the Eden of our contentment.

Daily we came short in the harder human relation,
Only in this easier obeying, Lord, Thy commands;
Meekly we washed his feet, meekly he licked our
hands -
Beseech Thee, overlook not this mutual grace of
salvation.

Canst Thou accept our pitiful good behaving,
Stooping to share at our hand that best we keep for
the beast?
Sir, receive the alms, though least, and bestowed on
the least,
Save us, and save somehow with us the means of our
saving.

Dante in the Eight Heaven beheld love's law
Run up and down on the infinite golden stairway;
Angels, men, brutes, plants, matter, up that fairway
All by love's cords are drawn, said he, and draw.

Thou that before the Fall didst make pre-emption
Of Adam, restore the privilege of the Garden,
Where he to the beasts was namer, tamer, and
warden;
Buy back his household and all in the world's
redemption.

When the Ark of the new life grounds upon Ararat
Grant us to carry into the rainbow's light,
In a basket of gratitude, the small, milk-white
Silken identity of Timothy, our cat.