this poem is not actually about cats

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From a slender anthology of verse written at the University of Cambridge during a period that included WWI: this brief, sad verse, in which we are all mice under the cat of Fate.

MICE
I see the broken bodies of women and men,
Temples of God ruined; I see the claws
Of sinister Fate, from the reach of whose feline paws
Never are safe the bodies of women and men.

Almighty Cat, it sits on the Throne of the World,
With paw outstretched, grinning at us, the mice,
Who play our trivial games of virtue and vice,
And pray—to That which sits on the Throne of the World!

From our beginning till all is over and done,
Unwitting who watches, pursuing our personal ends,
Hither and thither we scamper. The paw descends;
The paw descends and all is over and done.

 - Gerald Bullett (1893-1958) in Davison, Edward Lewis, 1898-. Cambridge Poets 1914-1920. Cambridge [Eng.]: W. Heffer & sons ltd., 1920. 31.