HARDLY NEWS
It’s hardly news to anyone
with eyes to see
that the end of the world is at hand.
The signs have long been there,
but we still have to eat
even if the food tastes of nothing,
so we made ourselves make something,
fried potatoes, some salad leaves,
no dressing, and a bit of fish,
its provenance unknown,
sell-by date yesterday.
The supermarket
was clearing its stock,
uncertain there’d be
any fresh deliveries.
Not what you’d call appetizing,
so we gobbled it down
in a hurry, anxious
not to be caught out
by the end of the world
with our mouths full.
Hardly News originally appeared in The Spectator.
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THE WHITE COCKATOO
We’re in the station restaurant in Amsterdam,
that looks out on platform two.
It’s the scene of our first date.
The white cockatoo is still there
after twenty years,
on its perch by the bar,
looking like a bird that’s seen too much.
We come here for the art nouveau interior
and the romantic angst
of a railway station grand café.
Hardly for the service,
though that has a certain
entertainment value.
That first time
our magret de canard arrived cold
after forty-five minutes,
as if they’d had to embalm it.
Yet we hardly noticed the delay,
holding hands across the table, and I thought
isn’t this wonderful.
But today I’m looking out of the window,
where a train is just leaving
and it is as if the restaurant
is pulling out, not the train,
leaving the platform of
certainties and a secure life.
Just then
the cockatoo flaps on its perch
and utters a cry
like a guard’s whistle,
and I stand up and wave
at the station we are leaving,
and at past and future at once.
And then I sit down again.
And you give me that old-
fashioned look of yours
I first saw
twenty years ago.
The White Cockatoo was originally published in Skylight 47.
