The Cat Watches




The cat watches.
Through languid eyes,
Relaxed beneath her cloaking fur,
The cat watches.
Silent, her secret breathing
Does not betray her.
The cat watches,
Her ears alert with longing,
Her muscles patiently waiting.
The cat watches,
Intent upon some hidden goal.
Unblinking,
The cat watches.
A flash of movement; imperceptibly
Her body awakens.
The cat watches,
Quietly calculating
Some enigmatic response.
The cat watches.
The mystery of her gaze
Encompassing all, revealing none,
The cat watches.




            
~ Marae Price








About "The Cat Watches"



I wrote this poem and then thought how perfect it would be to have it superimposed over a picture of a cat watching. I went online and looked for something suitable in the public domain. I found a lovely image of a Maine Coon cat (my own cat was a Maine Coon, with the same coloration, so this was especially fitting.) I did all the stuff you have to do with a photo-editor to get just the head, adjusted the color so it would lie subtly behind the words, plopped it on a page in my word processor, and arranged the poem over it. It looked great! I printed out a few copies on very nice paper and gave at least one or two to friends.

Not long thereafter, my power went out during a defrag, and my computer wouldn't boot up afterwards. I got a new computer, put the old hard drive in it as a second internal drive, and set about seeing what I could salvage. Other than the boot sectors, the only casualty of consequence was the folder where I had my images stored, including the image for "The Cat Watches" and all its precedents. Thankfully, I still had the word processor document, but I had no idea how to get the image out of it.

For years the poem languished thus, but this morning I got ambitious and did what I could have done all along: made a copy of the document, removed the words, and took a screenshot of the image. Then I dropped it into my graphics editor, tweaked the transparency, and saved a bunch of copies at all stages of the process.

At last, I can post this online, as I have wished I could do for years. Enjoy!

A postscript: The font I used for the poem is Lucida Calligraphy. If the text looks kind of ordinary, you might not have this font installed.