The speaker begins by withholding something: "I do not give much belief to the news." The phrase is oddly formal. People usually "believe" things, but here belief is something you hand over, a coin you can choose to keep. The news is then described in two quick strokes, "writ so simply / made of nothing." Its flimsiness is the point. Because the lines carry no punctuation, "made of nothing" can attach to the news itself or to the easy way it is written, and the poem doesn't choose between them. Either way, what arrives as information has no weight.
The second stanza widens the complaint from the news to the habit of waiting for it: "who expects every hour / to be troubled with fear / or hope." With no question mark, it reads like a rhetorical question, though it can also be heard as a portrait of a certain kind of person, always braced for the next message. The surprise is the word "troubled." We expect fear to trouble us, but the poem says hope does too. Both are ways of leaning away from the present toward something that hasn't happened, and the poem puts them on the same side of the ledger. The line break helps. "Or hope" sits alone on a two-syllable line, like an afterthought that turns out to be the sharpest remark in the stanza.
Then the poem turns, in its last three lines, from refusal to a kind of tending. "Now is not in a day or two" borrows the everyday phrase for "soon" and uses it to deny that the real moment can ever be postponed. "I look after it" is the plainest sentence in the poem, domestic and almost shy, the way one might speak of watching a neighbour's house. Then comes the odd closing phrase, "my little lock." The poem doesn't say what the lock is, and that openness is its richest moment. It could be a lock on a door, a way of keeping the present safe from the rumours outside. Or it could be a canal lock, a small chamber that holds the water still at one level between two others. I can't say which the poet intended, but both readings fit. Even the diminutive "little" belongs to the poem's modesty. Whatever the speaker guards, it is small, personal and enough.
The form does quiet work. There is no rhyme and no end punctuation, and the lines are short and plain, mostly one-syllable words, with "writ" the only slightly old-fashioned one. Each stanza begins with a longer line and then contracts, from nine syllables to four, from seven to four, as if the poem keeps drawing a breath in and letting it out. The effect is of someone putting down luggage. Sound ties the stanzas together as well. "News," "nothing," "not" and "now" all share an initial n, so the vocabulary of refusal slides into the word the poem finally trusts. Since "news" at root simply means new things, the sound pattern sets the endlessly new against the single steady present. In the last lines, "look," "little" and "lock" echo one another, so the closing phrase feels fastened shut.
The title adds one more piece. "Here and now" gives us the "here" that the poem itself never says, and the reader can fairly take "my little lock" as that here, a small enclosed place where the now is kept. That is a judgement drawn from the text, but it explains why the poem ends on a concrete object rather than an idea.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to do. It doesn't lecture or list what is wrong with headlines. In nine plain lines it shows a mind choosing where to put its attention, and it makes that choice sound like ordinary housekeeping rather than heroic calm. The poem suggests that being present is less a grand state than a small job, done daily, of looking after one thing.