Lost Cat

Along each backstreet
silhouetted metal 
makes heavy shoulders rise.
Grass tails curled like question marks
above the dancing weed scrub.
And between distant wheel trims,
unblinking retro-reflective eyes.

There are real ringers too.
Hundreds. Each eluding torchlight,
keeping a cautious ten steps ahead.
We catch some beneath cars,
their markings a match but
faces imprecise, misconstructed.
Back home, ‘MISSING’ posters
run the printer ink dry.

In ten days he’ll return.
Found by students in a bin on Bryn Road. 
We don’t know that yet.
The quiet dawn offers comfort, the sky 
across the park chequered by contrails. 
The night shift is bleaker. 
Our whispered calls interrupted 
by angry dogs, distrusting neighbours,
the cold hungry screams of a fox.

Poem originally published with the above illustration on The Cardiff Review ​website, now sadly defunct

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