We, your shadows
follow, never seen
but ever near,
whisker-nosy-nibbling
nosh you left for junk,
we’re craving, clawing
our bellies swelling
from your garbage
always growing
breeding mischief
in your bedroom leaving
fleas and feces
we are hated, hunted
but we are winners
know your darkness well.
Two Rats by Vincent van Gogh
Today at dVerse, Kim, gives us two poems one by Silvia Plath called Mushrooms and the second by her husband Ted Hughes named Thistles, they have some similarities in that they depict less desirable growth and are written in tercets. She challenge us to write inspired by one or both of the poems, something along the same lines. I cannot thing think of anything worse than rats.
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November 26, 2019
Björn Rudbergs writings 
Rats are awful, but they too serve a purpose.Well done Bjorn.
Funny you wrote about rats and I wrote mice. Rats give me the shivers.
Mice are sweet compared to rats.
I don’t mind them at all. But they keep me awake sometimes…
A great capture of those varmints most feared!
Awwww those cute fuzzy little critters? just kidding. Rat terriers come in handy for them but can wreak havoc on your yard with digging.
Ooh, rats – shudders! We do hate them, don’t we? even though they can make lovely pets. I think you capture the sense of them as invasive, dirty, repellant. Nice short lines, Bjorn – I’m guessing you went with “Mushrooms”!
Indeed.. it felt closer with what I could write tonight.
I have a fear of rats. We had to deal with in the many cheap rentals I lived in as a kid. They would chew through the walls, and they bit my sister. If you poisoned them, they would die in the walls or under the house and stink for weeks.
Rats. Pests. I applaud the snakes that eat them.
Aw Björn, little meeses — vile infected nasty little meeses!
“Eeeuw” to rats,”bravo “to your poem
I agree that rats are nasty creatures, they carry diseases, but they do serve a purpose in disposing of rubbish. My cat Luna keeps our house and garden free of rats. When I was a child, I rescued baby rats from the school laboratory when their tame mother died in a thunderstorm. Sadly, they didn’t survive. You’ve captured the essence of wild rats in this poem, Björn, with the idea of them hiding in shadows, their bellies swelling and leaving fleas and faeces. They are awful and would survive any kind of holocaust, together with cockroaches and flies.
Amazing that we hate rats and love squirrels with gophers, prairie dogs, marmots etc falling somewhere in the middle. Still, I gotta admit – they do creep me out, too.
whisker-nosy-nibbling – a poetic description. i am no fan, too!
Bjorn: you said to me, “I see a downward spiral into depression driven by dark words.” We must have been channeling each other that day. Interestingly, I took “shadows” in a Jungian way which gives the poem a different deeper spin than you intended and new meaning to the last line. And maybe “know” to “knowing”.
I had to look up the work nosh. Fun. It is rising in popularity. Not sure if you know about NGRAM: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nosh&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnosh%3B%2Cc0
Suggestions for possible future edits: a comma after “shadows”.
…..food for cats