From the beginning

You have always wandered outside our domain

Playing and napping

Needing only one syllable to express the joy

A world of your own invention

Beyond our naming

We took you for granted

Like roadside grass

Hardly anyone noticed your disappearance

How lightly your tiny paws had walked through

Our ears and into the Gods

Who will tilt his head and listen

To your quiet leaving?

And realize what we have lost?

Your untamable wildness

Was so much of our true nature

No, you did not vanish

You simply stepped out of our hasty vision

Always towards some future gain

Haunted by the unknowingness of the other world

Willie, I refuse to mourn for you

As humans mourn for their loss

I am as suspicious as you are

About my true belonging

Purring in a parallel world

With such equanimity as you stretch your limbs

I am amazed that you look quite ready

Becoming even fuller in your absence

As your tiny silhouette leaps into a high branch

While we close our eyes

Lapsing into a solitary terrain

Surely, it was your playfulness

That held the universe together

A space we are forbidden to enter

We ponder and strive, trapped in a false construction of time

As if performing some important task

You, Willie, overwhelmed me with your insignificance

Your powerlessness

So young and yet so eternal

"You have gone your sweet way," a Goethe would say

You were never the obedient kind

Always exploring

You could stir up a storm without our permission

Until we took a sudden pause in the middle of things

To inquire of your whereabouts

Did I just see your thin shadow rising up

Growing larger, pressing towards me like monsoon clouds

Swarming over the mountaintop

That I can no longer ignore your strange presence

And be astonished by it?

Willie, how I long to enter

The innocence that shaped you, protected you

This itself is sufficient

Needing no other vices to exist

But you, forever remain outside my imagination

Softly, your furry cheeks brush against our world

As if saying you are having so much fun

The exchange of shapes and forms

Disguised in time

With your dark eyes, curiously

Even in the moment of parting

Ready to greet the perpetual beginning

Who has died?

Willie, are we not the same matter that makes the stars

I can see it so clearly

The gentle reflection in your eyes

A calm light humbly flows into everything

Look, the waxing moon is rising

The pensive air carries the aroma of a summer garden

Like you, Willie, the night shadow is never quite fully in view

I have left the door open

I will sit in the dark and listen

Perhaps in the slow hesitant hours of dawn

I might hear the sound of you quietly sipping water

Willie, how patiently you accompany us

Into our own vanishing

 

PS. Willie was a stray cat briefly adopted my friend for a short time and he later disappeared.