Twelve centuries ago by a long Swiss lake,
Pangur Bán hunted and an Irish monk looked.
The monk strained for sense from knotty old books;
His Celtic cat stared at the rustling rocks.
The cat was sharper and more often struck,
But both loved the chase, and the monk loved his pet.
Twelve centuries later my dog and I
Walk Cambridge streets lost in separate thought.
He stops to sniff trails; I check my emails.
Sensing a modern mouse has scurried by,
He jingles his tags and trots on while I
Shake off my inbox, walk, and concentrate.
The monk’s name is lost. The name Pangur Bán
Lives on, but I assume it was only the man
Who saw the analogy of monk and pet
And put it in verse that speaks to us still. Yet
Could it be my dog and the long-passed cat
Who knew the truth? We all just do what
We’re made to do, and it’s better to do
It together. (Pangur Bán’s mice knew that too.)

Cf. the 9th-century Irish poem as translated by Robin Flower (“The Scholar and His Cat“) and by Seamus Heaney (as “Pangur Bán”); and see the Wikipedia entry for context.

“O aid me ere I err!” bade he.
“Nay, nay, I’ll not,” said she.
“I’ll aid ye not–you’re overwrought,” she sputtered in her tea.
“Avail me, please, I’m on my knees,”
Beseeched the lad, awailing.
“Peace,” said she, “your tears they’ll be completely unavailing.”
“I am,” said he, “a wretched me, with only this petition …”
“Your prayer,” said she, “moves not me, nor will I grant permission
To drip upon my tattered shoe your salty drops o’ woe.”
“I’d only note,” the laddie quote, a-pointing to his toe,
“That you have ta’en seat upon a steamin’ pot ‘o stew.
Underneath that very pot is set a hot fondue
And as you settle in, you see, the one flows in t’other
And both begin to drip upon my only little brother.
As he shakes, our boat it quakes, and o’er the gunnels flow
The last of the drips off the honeyed lips o’ the Bonghi-Donghi-Do.”
“Cease!” cried she. “Prattle not. I care not what you say.
I’ll sit right here and pull yer ear and watch the driplets flow.
I care not a wit for the Bonghi-Do; let him do what ere he may!”

How is it that the sidewalk where tiny flip-flops flapped
and trike wheels creaked
is still the same slab,
still cracked and pollen-streaked?
Nothing shifts in a year or two
yet once the years pile, everything’s new?

(Washington, DC)

They said, the ancients, that poetry
is a ladder to God. Maybe it’s not like that
when you read mine. But the day I knew it,
that I had recovered my voice through you–loose
as I was in a flock of clouds and goats
crashing out of a ravine to graze on dribble
of thornbush and bulrush, and the lean faces
of the moon and sun were fusing together–
that day the car broke down and an arrow
of blood on a boulder marked the road to Aleppo.

(“Siria,” from La bufera e altro, 1956, translated by Peter Levine)