The Cooked Meat Poem by Naveed Akram

When rice and milk and oranges and white icing
Do their best to make you happy;
I speak to you a moment for the luxury,
I snuggled into the armchair.
I stood up in it as a child of the room,
A kind of food yielded as a happy heap.
I saw that the cook had lost her situation,
The snatched meat would suffice as humans could.
“I wish, ” she said suddenly, “ we were on a sunny shore,
Where there can’t be any whooping-cough.”
I can see food for all those in this room,
And there is no cough waiting.