Today, try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts.
I chose to give voice to our cat.
She smelled different by June. Not wrong, exactly—more like the inside of a drawer left closed all summer. I put my nose to her ear anyway. She let me. Dogs don’t usually let cats do that. I knew before she did, maybe before the vet, before the weekend she stopped getting up for her bowl. Something in her chemistry had shifted: cortisol climbing, the body reorganizing its priorities. I read it the way you read a barometer, not thinking, just knowing. Those last weeks I slept near her. Not on her. Cats don’t do that. At least, not this cat. But near. The radius got smaller as she drew into herself— I mean as her breathing changed. When it did, I sat up. Sir David Attenborough says: let my animal see my dead body. He knows we understand. What I understand is this: she was here, a warmth and a smell and a kind of permission, and then the smell went wrong, and then it left, and then a room was just a room. I walked its edges for three days. Not looking. Checking what the walls held. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere I could find. I know what abandoned smells like; she didn’t smell like that. Nobody thinks to ask the cat.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
Marianne Moore was a well-known modernist poet, with a curious taste in hats. Though she wrote on many themes, I’ve always had some affection for her many poems about – or in the voice of – animals, such as “The Fish,” “Dock Rats,” “The Pangolin,” and “No Swan so Fine.”
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