On Balance
The nine-year-old son of an Antipodean farmer Saw two strange birds by a gum-tree And from Alice-in-Wonderland recognised dodos; A sensible child, he kept the whole thing to himself, But every day sneaked out and watched by the gum-tree, Watched the preening and dancing and wooing and mating and nesting, Watched the hunting and tending and coddling, the two birds devoted, Then heard at last the tiny crack of the shell As the world -cracked'too.
Professor Ignatius Brown, The only man in Kent who could know what he'd found, Was walking towards a bookshop he hadn't rummaged before Where, in the tattered cover of a late rebinding, Waited the manuscript of Hamlet.
He had only a dozen paces to go When the pavement split to match the gaping boards.
Mrs. Huggins was going to make up the quarrel (You could almost call it a feud) with her next- door neighbour; It was such a little thing really, she'd suddenly seen, Swarming bees or drooping branches or weeds blowing over the wall, Not a thing. she'd come to feel, to stand between neighbours: So, hand outstretched, she waddled towards the welcoming hand And both glowed for a moment of reconciliation Before they burned for ever.
Of course there were reckonings of another order: The enemy failed to win the war, Murder was nipped in the bud and rats in the arras; Some evaded the instant when cancer began to mumble of fear, When the children left home, and the lover begged: 'Can't we remember only the happy times?'
But, taking it all in all and by and large, Dodo. discovery and reconciliation Would have made it worthwhile going on.
MARGHANITA LASKI
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