This poem is part confessional, part autobiographical and part observational.  I'm not sure about the proportions, but the themes are there.
     I suppose that each generation looks askance at how the next is bringing up children and, even if you have no children of your own, it doesn't stop you having opinions.  Just look at ministers of education around the world to see that actual knowledge of teaching is obviously seen as a serious disadvantage to the successful carrying out of duties!
     Perhaps it is because the Christmas holidays this year in Catalonia have been unduly (!) extended so that the kids have not gone back to school until today, the 11th of January, that has encouraged me to think about the behaviour of children.  
     It is indeed true that you cannot remain impervious to the daily drama as child after howling child is dragged away from the swings in the outside part of the leisure centre cafe by exasperated parents.  It is also inevitable that you think of your own behaviour when you were that age.  Or at least you think about what you think was your behaviour at that age.  Whatever the truths of the situation, it is one - if only because of the sheer noise involved - that demands some sort of response!
     Living by the side of the sea, we also have a number of sellers who display their goods on sheets which can, in a moment (when the police have been seen) be gathered up and taken away out of the sight of the eyes of the law.  At the moment the objects for sale are sports shoes and mechanical toys, but during the high days of summer we were urged to buy baseball hats with the brand 'Obey' writ large on them.
     It was a combination of memory, observation and need to say something that prompted this poem.

Obey

I was, it must be said, unnervingly

polite when I was small.

When still too young

to understand the means,

I realised how ruthless

being nice could be.

My ready smile and fluent speech

(in accents unattached to who I was)

got me what tantrums never did.

I left the Roath Park swings when I was told;

agreed time limits for the saving

of my castle on the Barry beach

against the boringly relentless tide,

and always said my ‘please’ and ‘thank you’

without prompt.

Outside the house, in streets

where I was free to roam:

in Dogfield and in Malefant,

in Tewkesbury and Robert too,

my father’s whistled rhythm

(one-two and one-two-three and one)

would bring me back at once.

Just like the dogs we later had –

though Labradors were more

recalcitrant than ever Stephen was!

And so I watch the modern kids,

whose parents now

negotiate, cajole and plead

and often are rebuffed

with what looks like imperial distain!

But parenting’s an easy hit

when you have raised

no children of your own

to make your aim unsure.

Instead, reliance on the partial

memories of what you were

steady the telling shot.

I watch a girl ignore her parent’s call

and use her toddling sister’s wanderings

to justify her staying on the swings.

I watch three boys kick at a ball,

and then play on, ignoring

all their fathers’ shouts.

They deign to make faux turns

placating parent protest

allowing gesture, once again,

to take the place of fact.

And at my present age,

and distant from the young

(yet old) remembered self,

it’s tempting to assert

‘Obey’ has just become another

brand on baseball hats

(and always worn the wrong way round)

and that the concept is as distant now

as those delightful, winsome smiles that

creased my infant, knowing face.

The italics and bold print are intentional, as is the extra space before the final stanza.

     There is a sinister feel to the last line which I think is exactly what I was aiming at!

I was chasing a fugitive thought that I thought that I had had during my swim.  I could not remember if it was a real thought (something usable) or just a vague direction.  I could not remember topic, subject or depth.  Just a vague feeling that something which might have been was now consigned to not at all.  That doesn't stop you make a desultory sort of attempt to trawl through closed memories hoping that something magical will happen.  Well, it didn't and whatever apercu I did have will have to remain a lost treasure!
     But I wrote a few scrawls about the loss and found myself trying to make something of the negation, so to speak.  Then the memory of 'fishing' in Roath Park came back to me and a few jotted lines later the title, encapsulating another memory, was written down and soon I had enough to persuade myself that the lost memory had prompted something constructive after all!
     The title seems to promise that the following poem will be something like one of Aesop's Fables - as it happens, the poem is not like a fable, but the concept that an approachable story might contain a thought is one that I think is appropriate.
     I think this poem is about something like intellectual responsibility and an acceptance that new information might disrupt previously held assumptions.
     By the way, the dog's name was Penny and she was one of those dogs who spoils you for any future canine interloper for your affections!

The Rabbit Who Sat & Stared

Ideas breed elusiveness –

so you’re ashamed to say.

Sometimes they watch you

watching: hiding in full sight.

           

            They’re like those

tiddlers in the curving stream in

Roath Park’s wildest part:

there, and not there – some sort of

thought experiment protected

by refraction. 

                        And the clumsy

hands of childhood stayed by

what-if-I-do-catch-them – then, what then?

           

            Or like our dog. 

High strung and Labrador and spoilt. 

Who chasing a wild rabbit,

just before it slipped

into the longer grass, it stopped

and turned and sat and stared

at our brave hound,

                       

                        who promptly

ricocheted away, angle obtuse,

and sniffed and snuffled grass

ten safe feet far from

that unmoving thing.

Ideas glare you out, defying

the intentions that you thought you had.

Protected by an obviousness

that you so rarely see.

As it happens I did catch (once, and only once) a tiddler in the Park stream and put it in a jam jar and took it home.  It was dead within an hour or so.  I realise now that the care that I took over it: giving it a clean jar and fresh, clean, cold water from the tap was exactly the environment that the poor fish did not want after its muddy, vegetation filled original home.

     I would like to say that this death had a profound effect on me.  But it didn't.  I went out into the back yard and played in my wigwam and all, as far as I was concerned, was well with the world.