The old rat catcher

He's retired  now from this sort of thing and at 16 is enjoying a quiet life. Still very fond of his food, he was distressed a few weeks ago when toothache stopped him eating. The vet said he had a broken tooth but to remove it under a general anaesthetic would be a risk at his age. Fortunately a course of painkiller seems to have done the trick.

I thought there must be a poem about a rat catcher (apart from the one in Hamelin) and I found this. It immediately chimed for me because Tablet, aside from his hard-wired killing bite, is the gentlest cat imaginable. The rest of the feline tribe all love him and go to him for a vigorous tongue massage that none of the others provide.

The Rat Catcher
“Still alive, just checked,” he yelled
as we passed each other near the spot
and I remembered then
how I had stood and watched
the rat-catcher two days before
reach out to a weeping willow tree
to hide a wounded pigeon on a branch.
He held it there, he didn’t move
except to whisper creature
comforts to the thing,
almost killed moments before
by a tiding of murderous magpies
in the grass.
How wonderful it was,
to see the nature of a man
who hunts for pests to kill
but takes the time to save the world
every now and then.

(The poet, Michael J. Whelan, served as a peace keeper with the Irish Army in South Lebanon and Kosovo  Some of his other poems here resonate with  current preoccupations around conflict and flight.)