ANOTHER poem about youthful vitality, viewed by an older person on a bus journey. Here the observer-cum-listener is Iain Crichton Smith. The piece can be found in his New Collected Poems (Carcanet, £18.95).

TWO GIRLS SINGING

It neither was the words nor yet the tune.

Any tune would have done and any words.

Any listener or no listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning

in its own world of strange awakening,

or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running,

by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,

the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn’t the words or tune. It was the singing.

It was the human sweetness in that yellow,

the unpredicted voices of our kind.