Old Park and Playground on an Anniversary

(a picture-poem)


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

                                                               *****