What Was She Doing There? Poem by Mark Heathcote

What was she doing there was anyone's guess.
Like some old bag lady.
Was she just another displaced soul, a foreigner?
Sitting alone in Piccadilly Gardens
Today, with a child's toy pram
And two clothed dollies as companions
One dressed in green,
A much larger one in reddish-brown
Modestly, put on the fountain cobbles
Both are dressed in unwashed tatty linen clothes.
Her dollies, lying face down.
It would seem she wears a cloak of invisibility.

How odd, no one around is staring or looking
Not one sees the child's pram.
How it's only big enough for a small tabby cat.
How odd these two dishevelled babies look,
Lay at logger ends with the world around them.
Like miserable displaced flightless pigeons on the ground.
One was placed left of her, the other near her right ankle.
It's the 9th of October—2011
The time—tomorrow's date,10.10 am
On a wet, grey, Sunday morning
How odd, her presence irritates me.

Quietly, disturbs me.
Before I catch my 101 bus,
'Lord, what is real, what is--
Sequential, sequentially real that I can see or touch? '
Isn't this world full of unparalleled madness?
Isn't this world full of chaos, and unequalled sadness?
Grasping-at-straws to be understood?
How odd, how odd.
What are the implications?
'Lord, if I don't understand even you? '
I humbly ask like some old bag lady,
What was she doing there?
'What I am doing here.'