So you come into the kitchen one morning
(the only room with cat-flap access)
and you find the larger cat, covered in blood, on a chair
and patches of blood on the chair and the floor.
His left foreleg is limp, he can’t move it
from the wrist, as it were. A car, a tom-cat?
A dog, or even a suburban fox?
Pathetic, when you stroke him he still gives a very faint purr.

He limps about, on drugs. Two weeks, the damaged nerve is
       healing.
Our Alleluias go up. Because we’re there and see it
It’s like the end of a famine in Ethiopia—
more real, for us! The genuine rejoicing
that shakes a people at the end of a war—
crowds drinking, singing, splashing in the fountains!