A Cats Choice
I don’t know if we were the first,
other's had sailed away.
There were rumors of settlements.
Years later, pleading petitions to the king,
then silence.
Months of turmoil and torment
upon the merciless seas.
Our ship almost a wreck,
the pox and plague
having whittled us down,
to a motley band of hollow eyed scavengers.
Then Land sited!
The fabled Americas! Those yonder shores
must be that fearful, paradise of legend.
We had overcome!
The Captain led his weary folk ashore,
but being the ships cat I stayed
to find the last remaining rat.
That night I dreamed
that the ship up-anchored all by itself.
The men dashed back to the shore
to save the vessel, but I, the last sailor,
rigged the tattered sails
and flew before the wind back to England,
but not before I had fired my pistols
into the yelling, stranded, and doomed crew.
‘Not yet America,’ I thought – ‘not yet.’
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