She smoothed the topsoil with her hand,
glanced when I paused.
She was kneeling in the park:
“I’m burying my cat.”
Between tall camphor laurels,
her parked pram full of plastic bags
of clothes and worldly goods,
she had dug a small grave
with a piece of fallen branch
in the tree-shade, sifted the soil
free of glass and trash,
set aside a small pile of stones.
She saved the pure earth for his cover.
“I wrapped him in cloth:
It’s hard to find
a place to bury your cat
“when you’re homeless,
but he is home now,” she said.
She rescued him –
a stray – here six years ago.
She set the stones on his grave,
inscribing them with tears:
no chiselled words
for no words would do.
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