2025 Commended poem: 'the walled-off cats' by Michelle Lovric

the walled-off cats

In summer of 2022, the German town of Walldorf forced cat-owners to put their cats in lockdown, claiming that the pets were a danger to the rare crested lark. Cats were kept inside for three months, with fines of 50,000 euros for any owner who cat was found to have killed a crested lark.

Powers that think they be, they said no cats out of doors.
We stood accused of eating crested larks down to three breeding pairs.
For this, we were walled off in Walldorf, enclosed like nuns, our cat-flaps sealed,
our windows and doors denied us, our howls unpalliated.
Offered: a leash, more humiliating than imprisonment.

As if. We did not eat those larks. We might have bruised a few in fun.
We might have here or there snarked a silly head-feather to bat around.
But why chew crested lark when there is summer-fattened vole to savour?
Not much eating on a crested lark. Not much sport either: where they
might have brains - extra feathers. Too easy to catch. Nobody likes that.

What’s endangered in the state of Baden-Württemberg is not larks
but common sense. And now each home and every decency’s bookmarked
for our revenge. There shall be large, stark acts of darkness.
We shall plant reeking pods in your herbs; spray and stain
your tires with our essence of rotted basil and butane.
As for those dogs, who roamed while we were detained,
we shall mess royally with their drooling peasant heads.
We’ll do things to your gnomes that cannot be in poems.
Your wrist’s earmarked for a war-crime shaped to a claw’s arc.
And yes, darlings, this time, we shall dine on lark.

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Dead Cat Poetry Prize - winners and commendees, 2025

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Michelle Lovric is a novelist, poet and environmental campaigner. Her new novel, The Puffin, will be published by Salt in 2026. You can follow Michelle on Instagram