Poem(s) for Sunday

Enlightenment
Vijay Seshadri

“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.

( I find - Kit Fryatt, cut for some explicit content & Problematic eroticism )

Some good cats I have seen lately

1. Local white-bib tabby cat, having accosted a small family of three on the footpath at the corner just over the rail line. Blocking the path while demanding attention from a toddler. I've seen her before - met her hanging out on the grassy hill before the woods, last spring, and haven't seen much of her since.

2. Herself, the genius loci of Bümpliz's roman villa and old village centre. Today she was sitting upright and watchful just where the path through the mixed-use generationspark turns into the access to the old people's home, as I was on my run. I often get to pat her as I come through there, but today's choice of music had me in a jogging interval, so I waved. She did not acknowledge me.

3. Magnificent stripey ginger with conspicuous primordial pouch, in the street right where the residential part of Bümpliz Kleefield turns into industrial. I've seen him before, outside Kleefield shops; I'm always in a jogging interval through there, so haven't had a chance to make friends.