Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda

We love a man who can write poetic truths about salt shakers and beds… and cats!

🐈 Men would like to be fish or fowl,
snakes would rather have wings,
and dogs would rather be lions.
Engineers want to be poets,
flies emulate swallows,
and poets try hard to act like flies.
But the cat
wants nothing more than to be a cat,
and every cat is a pure cat
from its whiskers to its tail,
from sixth sense to squirming rat,
from nighttime to its golden eyes

Nothing hangs together quite like a cat
neither flowers nor the moon have
such consistency
It is a thing by itself
like the sun or a topaz

FROM "ODE TO THE CAT"