“A noise of boys in the rocks hunting some animal.” (Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals)

There in the English road,
boys on skateboards
surfing asphalt,
scattering blustery
whoops and hollers,
ambushing my pleasured
meditation of knoll
and sheep-laden rise,
heaving me rudely
from your wistful past,
Dorothy, to this
piercing present.

I covet that lost
reflective stillness,
but they will not
quit the grating
clamor and row.
This brace of young bucks,
knot of frogs
not yet princely,
prickle of hedgehogs,
murder of crows,
this noise of boys
have caught me
in their moment,
your words echoing

the collective anarchy.