Feature: Poem - 'Here’s to the Public' by Dinah Livingstone
Here’s to the Public
No one pays to go into Regent’s Park.
On this April afternoon
people enjoy the breezy sun
lighting the soft and the brilliant colours,
They loll on grass, stroll, chat
in English, Russian, Arabic –
London’s 300 languages.
I’m on a bench by the heronry,
some birds on big untidy nests,
others in pterodactyl flight
bring twigs or tasty morsels.
Two young men in jeans,
shirtless – still pale –
and a bouncy young woman
walk by, laughing, teasing.
A father, minding his threesome,
calls to the smallest on a mini-trike
while the sister cycles in pink
and an older brother outstrips them
on a cool scooter. The dad smiles at me,
pleased, self-deprecating.'
A mum peeps round the sun hood
of her pushchair and says ‘Boo!’
to her baby. Yes, they smile too.
Regent’s Park is a public place
where people can breathe freely,
take their ease, interact
and quite often look happy.
No one pays to go on Hampstead Heath
Where so many huge trees
are able to reach full stature,
oak, ash, beech, holly and hornbeam,
each shaped by its nature and history
so singularly beautiful,
yet together their quotient increases
offsetting, enhancing each other,
the whole transcending.
And look at all the different people,
some quite eccentric,
leading their lives, the public
owning the trees and open spaces,
while having their own conversations
or jogging or musing by themselves,
yet the pleasure of each adds to the atmosphere
an energy that is more than private,
heightened because joy is social.
I was invited to read some poems
to six-year-olds in a primary school.
They particularly liked a chorus
when they all grunted like a rude pig.
All sorts of children mixing together,
a teacher skilled at balancing
zest and order, a teaching assistant,
a decent amount of equipment,
paper and coloured pencils, a computer.
No one pays to go to that school,
so surely that is public rather than
those familiar to the Cabinet
where the entry price is pots of money.
Next door to the school is a public library
threatened with closure.
The children often use it,
there are plenty of books and DVDs.
The library is also for grown-up people.
Our children were born in a public hospital
or at home with a midwife on the national health.
At present no one pays
to go into our great museums.
That refusal to tax the rich,
that instinct to destroy everything free,
to slap a ticket machine by the Ladies’ Pond,
to privatise, to exclude those without means,
is barbaric. A kindly civilised people
needs large common spaces open to all,
not gated egoistic hatred.
Here’s to the public.