Three Poems
Janet Kenny

Foot Pad

A lean blue cat with iron flanks

predates the doves who use my lawn

for social meetings, giving thanks

for some judicious meals of corn.

The cat is not the type of feline

that evokes a soft rapport.

It always makes a rapid beeline

for the doves, with rabid jaw.

Athletic, lean and quick to hide

it emanates no sense of love.

It has no air of class or pride

nor hope for kindness from above.

It sees me as the enemy

and lopes away behind the shed

aware its share of dove will be

available when they are fed.

I have no hope of friendship from

this independent feral ghost,

this thin olympic peeping Tom,

that lives to win and get the most.

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Janet’s notes: “The birds in Australia are indescribably beautiful. My love–hate relationship with cats is entirely because of my fear for birds. I also love cats but I will never tell this to the birds.”

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Me and Him

It’s the me I was

he used to know

and that’s because

the him I knew

was young as he

and I were then

when I was five

and he was ten.

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Published in The HyperTexts, September 2026

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Miracle

I am the last to leave the room
and close the door, and close the door.
When we first met we left the gloom
to find what we were living for.
Not just us two but others who
discovered that the world went on
and on and we were glad to see
the lovely light that shone and shone.
A ceaseless spread of stars and sun
and waterfalls and crashing waves
and mountain peaks where everyone
astonished how this world behaves,
dissolved in light along our run
of angels heading for our graves.

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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.

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Three Poems Janet Kenny

Three Poems
Janet Kenny