When I walk to work I always walk across a pedestrian crossing. It’s near a primary school so it’s always very busy at the time I cross it, with others walking to work like me, and parents taking their kids to school. Very often there are queues of cars waiting to pass as so many people cross it frequently. I sometimes enjoy watching people cautiously step out onto the crossing, waving and thanking drivers on each side of the road. It’s probably a British thing isn’t it? That tendency to over-thank when someone does something relatively trivial for us, or in the case of a pedestrian crossing just not run us over with their car! Anyway there’s something cool about traffic stopping for you, about going first, about being the priority. This poem is about that.
