Pangur Blah

I and Pangur Ban my cat,

'Tis a like task we are at;

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night . . .

(found in the margins of a 9th-century

Irish manuscript)

The woeful difference now is that

it's I who mouse and not my cat,

or rather I who listlessly

swat prey around my pad while he,

an urban beast (hence unemployed),

does naught but nap and shed and void;

bugs are all he gets to bite,

the sporadic phrase is all I write.

A melancholy pair we make:

I without a line to break,

my limp grimalkin rodentless,

superfluous the both of us.

And so we stew in this our dumb,

indolent scriptorium,

whose air is cleft by sighs and creaks

yet never once that fateful squeak.