The Breakfast Machine Poem by Helen Ivory

Behind a wood sliding door
the whistling and grinding
of a great machine
brings us slowly, inexorably
towards breakfast.

Even the keenest eyes
of the imagination,
will not inform you
what kind of alchemy
is at work there.

The chicken is the thing
that troubles me most,
as she crosses the kitchen
on squeaky tin legs
emerges at the serving hatch

cocks her head to one side,
takes in the room
with the bead of an eye
shrieks out with a voice
like grating glass:

Scrambled, poached, boiled,
scrambled, poached, boiled.