Time should be standing still.

It’s four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. The soft pre-spring sunlight is warming and relaxing.  Around me  children are jumping and running on stone walls and grass nearby. Yelling and shouting and sometimes falling : any of whom could land on me. I vaguely notice that they’re playing with foam mats. I can hear the slap nearby any of which could hit me.

I’m aware but not worried. I’m almost imperturbable for a change!

I’m reading poetry.  Not mine. That of a fellow traveller.

A few days earlier, she had introduced herself.  She then said she wrote poetry. I laughed in joy. And completely forgot to introduce myself! Yet two days before that, as I then said, I was introduced as a poet.  And as I failed to add,  neither then or now, I didn’t argue or try to soften the impression.

The children play and nearly run into me.   But I don’t sense a danger.  I’m too busy reading someone whose thoughts I cannot ever imitate,  whose words I can never replicate, someone not unlike me.