It's Still Life

A Cat Like That – A Still Life with a Canary and a Hungry Cat
(in the style of an Atwood poem)

Here is a parrot
feasting on red currants.
It severs
blood-red deep gems
from each squat
fragile stem.

Here are plums.
Ripe damsons
with their deep clefts
exposed.
Resting, open
in wicker weave.

Here is a vase, tall
elongated blue,
holding rose
blossoms, soft
as velvet lips, lazily
held aloft by
leaves green, veins
stroked by light.

Here are vines that
spill from that vase.
They balance
the air.
An afterthought,
to fill what is
bare.

And here is a cat
white as new snow.
Almond eyes
the shade
of rose leaves,
and it paw confesses
to the demise
of a small yellow bird.

Here is a cat
that knows
it’s a cat.

This image first came to my attention at Visual Verse Anthology on Instagram. The poem’s inspired (as in the style) of “Genre Painting” by Margaret Atwood. Image is public domain, a firescreen 1825 block print on paper. The Cooper-Hewitt Collection at the Smithsonian Design Museum, “Still Life with a Canary, Or a Hungry Cat”.