animals

SILVER

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Silver, the cat

SILVER 

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch

Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

Couched in his kennel, like a log,

With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep

Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

With silver claws and a silver eye;

And moveless fish in the water gleam,

By silver reeds in a silver stream.

— Walter de la Mare

MY HEART BELONGS TO YONA

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Don’t think of her as gone away –
her journey’s just begun,
life holds so many facets –
this earth is only one.

Just think of her as resting
from the sorrows and the tears
in a place of warmth and comfort
where there are no days and years.

Think how she must be wishing
that we could know today
how nothing but our sadness
can really pass away.

And think of her as living

And think of her as living
In the hearts of those she touched
For nothing loved is ever lost –
And she was loved so much.

—Her Journey’s Just Begun by Ellen Brenneman
YONA

It’s been six months now, and it still hurts that you’re gone.

You will never be forgotten, little one. The way you suckled at my earlobe as if I were your mommy. Your cooing little mews. Your pink-black nose and pink and black jellybean-toes. The way you’d roll over and show your belly. The way you’d open your mouth, leaving it agape as if always in surprise. The way you’d get on your hind legs like a meerkat. The way you blended in with a pile of autumn leaves.

Your ginger tip to your tail. Your sweet, trusting nature. Your big, innocent eyes. The way you telegraphed a pounce by the way you’d wiggle your butt. Your presence on the cat tree. The way you’d lay with me in bed on lazy mornings when I didn’t want to get up. Your sweet, never-ending positive energy radiated so much warmth into this little house.

You were in my life so briefly, just a moment, it seems, but it meant so much. Wherever forever is, there you are. To forever.

MY BELOVED KITTY

THE BIG DUCK

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“Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular – typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.”

– MARTIN FILLER

“Martin Filler Quotes.” BrainyQuote.com. BrainyMedia Inc, 2021. 18 October 2021. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/martin_filler_557741
The Big Duck, Flanders, Long Island, NY, 2005
National Register of Historic Places, Suffolk County, New York

COSMO THE CAT

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“But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover –
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

― T.S. ELIOT, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats