……over the edge

….from the nursery across the street,
I hear the sounds of rushing feet
and gleeful, over-shoulder goodbyes,
not even contact with mother’s eyes.
Alone all day to play with friends
while mother and father
fight to find ends,
let alone make them meet!
To keep ‘baby’ healthy
and buy large eye gifts,
generation separating things
that parental imagination
never thought could exist.

Joy shrieking, learn wandering,
through their day of play,
once a neighbour complained
that “that such a facility should
not be in a residential space..
(as statisticians working from home),
..could not bear the noise of this place”.
He moved…..
They, happily play on, unaware
as should be.

But generation gaps are now canyons.
Most under 40’s have shared this absence,
left alone to navigate, without a sail
just a pilot, those needed departed?
Is detachment of young spirit
a subtle conditioning through
necessary gregarious engagement,
later rejected?
A displaced absorption from ’parent’s knee’,
substituting language, mannerism or even physicality
for which only familiar DNA has the key?

Locked away forever,
inhibited by prevailing culture
that belongs to the consuming mass,
instead of the sweet intimacy of the nest
or grandma’s best?
Then there! A green bud
whose spirit shouts though lips sealed,
flashing against society’s soil
that the unselfish, the unspoilt
do persist.

dwk