The Rats

The rats (sadly no longer with us) are Peanut (left) and Millie (right).

This poem is about them:

Rats!

Long after they’ve vanished

I remember the time

when I went away and you cared for them

not wisely but too well,

letting them out of their cage

despite dire warnings—

so you sat up half the night

with the door propped open,

staring over your glass of whisky,

bedevilled by their witching tails.

 

Dorothy Yamamoto

from Landscape with a Hundred Bridges (Blinking Eye Publishing, 2007)