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.