A poem

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.

(with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)