Tabby Cat War Baby
If you lie upside-down and look at it,
The sky is a lake where someone has thrown oil barrels.
Smoke leaks upwards in black trails.
Somewhere distant and comic, machine guns are nails dragged down washboards.
Next to an abandoned washing machine
And riddled signpost, a cat cries for food.
No-one knows if the cat is Serb or Croat. Maybe he’s Muslim.
He rubs his head in each soldier’s hand equally,
Military or paramilitary.
He is a Jazz musician in a wrecked café.
He is the old Yugoslavia, hanging on
With his one eye and his handful of tunes:
I love you and I’m hungry
Playing in an empty town to passing audiences.
Michael Brett
Michael Brett lives in London and is a past winner of the Iolaire Poetry
Prize. During the Civil War in the former Yugloslavia, he worked in the
press section of the Bosnian Information Centre, London.
