We arrived early at the old park on a Monday
Scuttled from a visit to a horse farm by heavy traffic, no,
by my misgivings
About such a day being about a busy road
When anything can’t match the collective happiness that
once was
Bottled in a day. Hey,
we can find a quiet space to get a whiff again, I said
To the disappointment of two out of three of us
Past the cement rink where we sometimes scooter
Past the long lawns now empty of ball kicking school children
Past the hushed trees in summer respite
And wandered into the empty playground at far end
If you notice you’ll see the park is old, made by minds
and hands of the 60’s, 70’s
Where in the low swing set, two out of three of us found
a rhythm
A 20-something backpacked boy found his way to the picnic
tables
Alone in the green, in a space of his own, opened his
laptop
If you notice you’ll see the spaces are different, when more
adventure was allowed
In play and scream. I ran my fingers on the metal slide,
it was hot
With no rough edges, unlike the slides where I grew up
My skirt sometimes nabbing a surprised tear, always L
shaped
The play structures are different, the shadows, the spaces
are different
As if life then wasn't held up pedestal by pedestal
The monkey bars were set higher, the breaths were deeper
Maybe the silences were longer, yes, the silences were
longer
So maybe the music was heard, it was not always all sound
That doesn't stop but steps up and up a ladder with no
slide
A mom glided in with a loaded stroller, a toddler and a
baby
Smiling baby on lap she sat near the sand and chatted
On speaker- We are
going to hang out here and go to grandmas for lunch
An old man sauntered in and went off to the tables
Near the lone boy, the way the old need the young and the
young
Don’t need the old
I rested at the arbor, found only in these old
parks
I sat on the metal bench, like so many before me
Like so many before me, I walked away
A stranger to all that passed through here
Like how the boy and the old man barely saw
That I was here, we were here, on a morning of an anniversary
Maybe I’m looking at it differently
Like how my son, if asked, will recount a different way
of seeing
The same. Maybe there’s
music at all times
Even when I don’t get the sequences of sounds and silences
Maybe there’s always a need. Because it's the infants, the
old, the different,
Who know. Who know of the space and silence that’s always
in our minds and hands
*****
