Where's my lunch? Well now, I fear the cupboard's bare!
Time to fall back on scavenging for scraps,
through rubbish heaps and dustbins to survive
or find a meal, and even those yield slender pickings.
Once you'd have found immaculate fish-heads,
-tails and -bones like ichthyosaurs, for cartoon cats
to steal, potato peel and chips gone cold
in papers old as yesterday, and ash and cinders,
the residue of forests, fossilised or live.
Now it's mostly plastic shards and shreds,
old cat food tins and wrappers from fish-fingers.
I've heard we'll burn or bury ourselves yet.
What have you heard?
4 comments:
Remember milk in buckets set out on the stoop on a cold morning? No container to throw away afterwards. Our garbage even smells different than it used to when I was a girl. Your words have stirred up some memories, dear Lucy.
Rubbish - an admirable basis for psycho-analysing the bin's owner. I don't think I know anyone who throws (or, rather, threw) away chips. They carry a gustatory imperative. Even today's plastic wrappings carry hints - the combination of cat food and fish-fingers suggests something I can't quite pin down: like pet, like owner?
There's definitely a cat prowling down an alley in this poem, rattling a few dustbin lids, and in doing so finding how the world has changed! From "immaculate fish-heads" to "plastic shards and shreds". I like also "the residue of forests, fossilised or live."
(o)
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