HUNGER GAMES

It’s easy in this season of excess to forget that we, the fortunate ones, are a privileged minority in a world where hunger is more common than joy and where our domestic pets are often better fed than Third World children.

 CORDON BLUES

Carefully, she reads the menu,

every dish an inspiration,

poetry and passion blended

as the poet-chef intended:

every dish a demonstration

of the rightness of the venue.

Then a waiter, laden, comes

with plentiful, expensive food

on patterned platters, napkins, white,

but suddenly her appetite

recedes: she pictures fingers, crude,

that clutch at her and beg for crumbs.