Monday, August 20, 2018

Cats of the Forum Romanum





There were strange lights in the sky in the early
hours of fifteenth of March, 44BC,
flashes of crimson, hues of blues and yellows,
they had been seen before, when Rome was the prey.

The temple cats stirred and became restless
looking upwards then quickly darting down
to vanish beneath the sacred buildings,
hierarchies and animosities forgotten.

In the chill of morning they watched the sixty
senators stride past led by Brutus and
Cassius. The black tom, known as Magnus
Lux, the Great Light, was heard to remark

'Yon Cassius, hear his slack bones clack,
methinks he needs a good feed and fuck.' The cats
of Rome, like the plebeians, were known for their
vulgarity. They watched as Julius Caesar passed

and heard his taunt to Spurinna the Haruspex
that 'The Ides of March are come.' The Haruspex,
a seer in entrails, had divined danger for Caesar
and so replied 'Aye Caesar, but not gone...'

The cats, a clowder of mewling and yowling
orphans, a ragbag of feline protestation
sensing assassination in the ribbed
and clacking air, followed the gathering

'By the bollocks of Jupiter' said Magnus Lux
'This day will be marked in metal and bone.'
And when Brutus thrust his weapon up high
into his father to forge one of the

twenty seven wounds, to ensure he would
not rise again, the general and god had spat
with blood 'And you child?' And so the deed
was surely done and gods, and cats, all slinked away.

In the ensuing centuries the cats witnessed
the wars and fires, the murderous retributions,
the excesses, and secret assignations;
the screech and the scream of metal on bone,

all of the triumphs and trials, processions
and condemnations, the memorials, the shrines
the arches and the grandeur. More strange lights,
the raw vermilion of war, and the cats

cowered among smokey ruins. Roman gods
were thus deposed and history rewritten.
Yeshua, a Jewish mystic who was
executed by the state became the god

Jesu Christus, and the masonry of
forum temples was used to build churches
in his honour. The twelve guilded deities
of the forum and the myriad minor gods

were replaced by statues of apostles,
angels and saints. Some said Yeshua
would awake in horror at his deification
and return to cast the new temples asunder.

But they were put to death for heresy.
Magnus Lux remarked that 'the new boss
smells like the old boss.' And the temple cats
slinked around and slept among the ruins.

They lived those millennia being fed
each day by the Gattara, a Crazy Cat
Lady, dressed in black and murmuring
in Latin, of news and scandals of papacy

and politics and the curse of inhumanity,
how the paupers had become princes
how the princes had become corrupt
and how nothing changes through the ages.

And how the rule of power and corruption
has persisted from age to age. And the black tom
Magnus Lux would reply 'Carpe noctem'
that 'We cats will always seize the night'.



No comments:

  Drowning in Blue “ Ever had one of those moments when you flip down the sunvisor and a huntsman drops into your lap? Guess who I bum...