GreenKnight
New Member
A new take on an old favourite...
IF
If you can keep your head when all around you
Are losing theirs and tripping over you
If you can find a home when none has found you
And claim their garden, house and bedroom too
If you can wash a mile from any water
And roam without recourse to any map
Unwind from cold and calculating slaughter
By curling on a warm and cosy lap:
If you can fall, and find your feet by falling
If you can sleep, yet keep a watchful brain
If you can wake the dead with caterwauling
Or die yourself, and live to die again
If you can stare for minutes without blinking
And wear for hours on end a dreamy smile
And seem to think – quite undisturbed by thinking –
Through narrowed eyes aglow with secret guile:
If you can make one heap of shredded paper
From books they thought were safely out of reach
And sigh, and sulk, and claw and madly caper
At all attempts to reprimand or teach
If you can force your bleary-headed owner
To let you in and out the door at dawn
And oscillate from socialite to loner
And stare back in again with face forlorn:
If you can walk on shelves and spare the china
Ignore commands but answer to your name
If you can hog the whole of a recliner
Designed to hold the largest human frame
If you can turn to stone for half a minute
And climb a tree in fifteen seconds flat
Yours is the blackbird, nightingale and linnet,
For – after all – you are a cat. My cat.
Nick Green (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)
IF
If you can keep your head when all around you
Are losing theirs and tripping over you
If you can find a home when none has found you
And claim their garden, house and bedroom too
If you can wash a mile from any water
And roam without recourse to any map
Unwind from cold and calculating slaughter
By curling on a warm and cosy lap:
If you can fall, and find your feet by falling
If you can sleep, yet keep a watchful brain
If you can wake the dead with caterwauling
Or die yourself, and live to die again
If you can stare for minutes without blinking
And wear for hours on end a dreamy smile
And seem to think – quite undisturbed by thinking –
Through narrowed eyes aglow with secret guile:
If you can make one heap of shredded paper
From books they thought were safely out of reach
And sigh, and sulk, and claw and madly caper
At all attempts to reprimand or teach
If you can force your bleary-headed owner
To let you in and out the door at dawn
And oscillate from socialite to loner
And stare back in again with face forlorn:
If you can walk on shelves and spare the china
Ignore commands but answer to your name
If you can hog the whole of a recliner
Designed to hold the largest human frame
If you can turn to stone for half a minute
And climb a tree in fifteen seconds flat
Yours is the blackbird, nightingale and linnet,
For – after all – you are a cat. My cat.
Nick Green (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)
