Those kids you wrote about had hardly noticed you.
You were simply a woman standing on a hill
Notebook in hand,
Your expression slightly abstracted,
Slightly unconnected with the moment
That they completely occupied.
You were merely part of the landscape that they owned,
An object to be ignored, to be quickly shuffled around,
Or brusquely nudged aside.
You were a mother snatching an hour of peace and quiet,
Observing the city, the bomb scabbed human hive,
The battered streets
Spread wide in skeins of mist below the park.
But it was not the view that occupied your thoughts,
Not the smoke black towers, the gaps between the houses,
The nests of cranes like splinters in the sky; -
The embryo of a poem, conceived from signs and sound-bites,
Was forming brand new stories in your head;
Stories that spoke of children, alive or dead.
That moment was long ago, and the passing crocodile of infant egos
Has long since shunted out of primary school
To occupy the world of adult angst. Those kids have grown quite old now,
And your poem has been fifty years in print,
A text for first year students; a classic to be wondered at.
But those schoolgirls in the park that February day, -
Grandmums perhaps, comfy in post war flats, -
I doubt that few recall that classroom outing,
Or a woman standing windblown on Kite Hill,
A notebook in her hand.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
12th. - 15th. - 18th. - 19th. - 20th. May 2015.
Locally the hill is known as Kite Hill, because it is the perfect location from which to fly a kite.
When I was fourteen or fifteen I had the great good luck to spend an evening and a day in the company of Sylvia Plath. We talked about Keats, a new discovery for me at the time, and she impressed upon me the supreme importance of poetry. God bless her.
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