Parliament Hill Fields Revisited. (New Ending).

Those kids you wrote about had hardly noticed you.
You were just a woman standing on a hill
Notebook in hand,
Perhaps a shopping list or the day to day accounts.

You seemed so much like any other adult,
Peering deep into your thoughts, your face a blank,
And distinctly unconnected with the moment
They completely occupied.

This stillness did not stop them in their tracks,
In fact it made no mark at all, no simple glyph;
You were just part of the landscape that they owned,
An object to ignore, to quickly shuffle passed
Or brusquely nudge aside.

Your history was far from simple, far from dull.
A mother snatching an hour of peace and quiet
To observe the post war city, the battered human hive
Of bombed out streets and terraces, of skeletal building sites,
Spread wide in skeins of mist below the park.

But it was not the view that occupied your thoughts,
The embryo of a poem, conceived from signs and soundbites,
Was forming street wise stories in your head;
Stories that spoke of children, alive and dead.

Those school girls in the park have grown quite old now,
And your poem has been fifty years in print.
I suspect that few recall that classroom outing,
It was just another field trip after all;
A lesson out of doors.

And you, my friend, a silent windblown presence
Mourning a stillborn child you seldom name,
Watched, through glacial grief, these restless infants
Swarming down Kite Hill, under the eye of teacher,
Her tongue a clamour of stings.

Soon they were out of sight, their voices lost
Deep in the thrum of traffic, the clatter of trains.
Losing the light, you check your notes, add changes,
Scribble remarks. The poem will be simpler now,
Those fractious children have redeemed the height
On which you stand and grieve.
Thinking on this, you start the short walk home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
12th. - 20th. May. - 26th. 27th. October 2015.
Final part rewritten, January 26th. - 27th. 2018. 
This poem is about the ordinary and the extraordinary relating on a day to day level.