Member Poem

The cats at Camelot
dueled at dusk
on the castle battlements,
twilight pooled in their eyes,
claws drawn,
jousting for their spot
beneath the circled canopy
of Arthur's table.

On the night that Lancelot
met Guinevere,
the cats at Camelot
read dire auguries
in mouse bones,
in how the autumn wind
curled cold under their bellies,
in the comet's twinned tails.

So they gathered by the river,
all the cats at Camelot,
from champion toms and queens
to the least and last-born kitten,
and in the midnight river's run
drowned their ninth lives
to stall the coming
of that malignant fate.

(First published in Eye to the Telescope)