2025 Commended poem: 'Snapshot' by Rachel Maloney

Snapshot

My neighbour bought her little one a hamster, not a cat

I questioned this, as don’t they have a shelf-life?

A three-year expiration date, or something like that

She agrees, but sees them as a useful tool for teaching about grief

Before the inevitable years

When grandparents start to drop off the edge of the world

Cats live too long. That wasn’t true for mine

I remember the injustice, the refusal to accept the crime

That some be-whiskered Fate decreed

My kitten should have swaggered on in teenage anarchy

And hunted down that hamster in his dreams

We had planned his first birthday with screwball wrapping paper

His own personal catnip. Uninterested in the gifts within,

He’d been ecstatic at Christmas in the black bin

A high-tailed, crackling snapshot of joy.

I thought he would come back, a friendly ghost to stalk our garden square

And finish up his abandoned bowl of tiny fishbone biscuits

To keep the cold from my feet, as always

It wasn’t fair (and the hamster lived on regardless)

He’d been gone once before, a whole day and a night

Paw swollen from a fall, or a lopsided fight

That was the second trip to the vet, this time less woozy from the drugs

And nothing vital missing.

But now it was a day and night and day

And all the while he lay, on the grass-verge where a stranger

With some kindly impulse moved him

Knocked down by some night-owl with a death-wish drive

Dad dug a little grave next to my sister’s long-lost rabbit

(Now the snowdrops and the daffodils nod heads together on their bones)

I could see the panic in his eyes when he wouldn’t fit

That tassel-tail frozen in a half-exultant twitch

But not to worry, in seconds it was across the knee

And snapped, quite clean and clinically.

My mother was as rigid as the tiny skeleton

And sent us both inside before she snapped herself

In later years, therapists have sometimes teased the thread

How did that make you feel, they said.

I don’t know; it’s funny now, in hindsight.

We thought about a gravestone, etched in slate

For Catkin, named for his little lamb’s-tail

Like those that shiver in the spring breeze of hazel trees

A kitsch name that was meant to be a joke

But my mother liked it, and fed him chicken scraps under the table

We decided against the plaque; tails no longer mentionable

And built a rockery from my shell and river-stone collection

The snails enjoy it

We never had another cat, and the grandparents continued to die

Up the road, they eventually lost the hamster

And got guinea pigs instead

It’ll teach them about responsibility, she said

Adulthood, mourning, and the realities of life

Pets are good for that. Love and loss, and cleaning up after other people

So I never got another.

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Dead Cat Poetry Prize - winners and commendees, 2025

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Rachel Maloney is a poet, writer and researcher interested in nature, history and language, and would love to be a cat in another life.