Cats are Poets
Posted: June 20, 2014 Filed under: poem | Tags: Billy Collins, cats and dogs, poems Comments Off on Cats are PoetsEveryone here can read & write
The dogs in poetry
The cats & everyone else in prose.
— Billy Collins, from Revenant
Billy Collins is mistaken!
Cats are the poets.
Dogs are expressive, expansive, verbose.
Dogs can make a whole big paragraph out of one long sentence.
A cat communique is a distillation, spare, sketchy, surreptitious.
A dog expounds on the nature of things,
essays about the sidewalk, the car, the doorbell.
A cat might offer a haiku about a window pane,
but a dog will go on and build a novella with plot twists
and character development, co-authored with a neighbor dog.
While a cat weighs every utterance, gesture, metaphor,
a dog, more literal, turns a few phrases, spins a tale.