POETRY
Eating Time
A poem of food for thought
Our parents take their seats, Unfurl a linen napkin, Peruse the menu, wine list, In orderly manner place their order. A pause, a chance to chat, To look around and people-watch. The starters are brought out To start with. All is measured, all familiar. Were they to conjure their own parents To the table, they would find Naught amiss. No bombe surprise. Unless that was their wish of All the dishes duly furnished From the trolley. Course follows course, of course. The plaice in its set place. Stately and serene, this lunch. Time ticks at a pedestrian pace, As maître d’s perambulate.
We rush to claim a perch atop A steel stalk sprouted ring that fences This gear-slicked contraption. An asteroid belt of coloured plates Slips past our eyes and through our fingers. The kaitenzushi swooshes by, A nanosecond to descry each Wrap or roll or primped and packaged Nugget, gobbet, moment, morsel. Robotically we try to press some Off switch, downshift, time out, please! But no, we can’t get off the travelator Taste-o-rama whistle-stop until It’s time to totalise and leave. Our minds have indigestion, Though our pocket’s light enough.
Our children? Will they mainline Express trainline App-bespoke Unspeakables? On the go And on the fly And on the way To who knows why? Expect they will.
This poem came out of a comment I made on another piece a few days ago, likening the quickening pace of technological and social change to the difference between a traditional silver service restaurant and a kaitenzushi conveyor belt eatery, with food rushing past before we have a chance to identify it, much less select and sample it.
As a Gen X parent I find myself in a strange societal sandwich, familiar with the sedate pace and established certainties of my parents’ generation; adapted, more or less, to the digital era that dawned as we reached adulthood. But also an onlooker of the blurred TikTok phantasmagoria of the next generation.
The verses are meant to reflect that shifting sense of pace and familiarity. From solid state to liquid lunch?
More poems like this, and others very unlike it, can be found here:
