This article is going to be a creative writing attempt. The following will be an adaptation of a folk tale from the British Isles known as “The King o’ the Cats.” The story traditionally goes that a man wandering along a path hears a voice or is spoken to by a cat, telling him to tell [insert peculiar name here] that [another peculiar name] has died. When the traveler reaches his destination and imparts the news to the designated party, the house cat leaps up and screams “that means I am the King of Cats!” before running out of the house to never be seen again. Other variations have the traveler stumble upon a royal funeral held by various cats before going to the other man’s house to explain what he saw.
I will also being using the Gaelic mythos of the “cat sidhe” in Irish or “Cat Sìth” in Scottish. The rough English pronunciation is “caught shee”, so any time that shows up in the poem, please keep this in mind. Cat sidhe are characterized by black fur with a white patch upon the breast and even appear in their own variation of the “King o’ the Cats” tale.
Lastly, the type of poetic styling I will use is a traditional Anglo-Saxon approach. The two defining traits I will mimic are alliteration and caesuras (breaks in the middle of the lines) for emphasis. I will not attempt to adhere to the traditional rhythm or rhyming schemes as this will be in free verse. With all this said, let us begin:
