Browsing through the poetry of Thomas Morgan McGurk, my late father, I found this one, about his sister-in-law Struan's pure white cat, called Sugie (pronounced "shoogie" because she was as white as sugar.)
You'll notice that this contains proof, if such were needed, that my parents used to take a dictionary to bed and find exciting new words. Here's an opportunity to expand your vocabulary!
Anyway, it's the internet, and you know, cats ...
SUGIE
Albescent puss, proliferous and proud,
Cohabitant of luxury and ease,
What dream obtrude upon they gremial sleep?
What heart-seducing, feline Odysseys?
Distract thee from thy couch, when day has gone,
And night has wrapped its mantle round thy heart,
Calling thee forth, where wanton Tom-cats sing
Their love-songs with an unmelodious art?
Immantled in thy coat of hirsute snow,
Quivered with barbs of loveliness and grace;
The moonlit yard, beneath a starlit sky,
Is surely not for thee the safest place!
While shades of ancestors behind thee stand,
Adjuring thee to spurn thy false delights,
Biology has destined thee to write
An Iliad of polyandrous nights.
Go forth, and taste the sweet, connubial air,
The door's ajar, and Hymen holds his court,
Fair nymphomaniac, now take the field,
Horripilant and fierce before the sport!
Methinks it is a fate of worst degree,
A jest of feline gods in bacchic mood,
First to be born a cat, and then to act
The masquerade of humans, preaching good.
And yet, meseems, for thee the loving hands
Of gentle humans toil with tireless jest.
The lap of luxury, the cup of joy
Is shared with thee. Was ever cat so blest?
For thee the night is dark with felon's stealth,
When comely maidens, armed with spade and pail,
Delve the rich loam of dewy pleasances
And sift it then of worm, and slug, and snail.
What wonders of the deft, chromatic brush,
What meadows lush, and opalescent meads
Are to the world denied, through hours ill-spent
In min'stering to thy sanitary needs?
Oh, then the gay glissade, the lepid leap!
The vanished languor and the routed sloth
!
Art is well lost for rapture such as this
And kings would lose their crowns for less, in troth.
Sugie! Thy name should blaze in solar glow,
Lighting a canvas in thy mistress' flat,
Amid thy progeny, esconsed in luxury,
The feline matriarch, the model cat.
T.M.M 5th January 1947
