'What they're saying doesn't matter'

 The garden of our house in Lichfield backs onto a school playing field – which is good news because (a) it means the garden has an open view and is not overlooked, and (b) we both happen to like hearing the voices of children at play, at least when they're of primary school age. 
Gavin Ewart writes about this in a poem called 'Back' –

They come back, the terrible old words,
words like 'heart-piercing', 
from the bad poems in the anthologies,
when I hear the voices of the children playing –
but not what they are saying.

I think back, ten or eleven years,
when we could hear sing
our own kids' trebles – the tree of knowledge is
apt to grow too fast in any London garden –
and soon our feelings harden.

They float back, like an archaic rhyme,
brightly transpiercing
parental minds, strong as old theologies,
sweet, that all too soon will grow both sour and flatter – 
what they're saying doesn't matter. 

(A clever rhyme scheme there, with lines two and three of each stanza rhyming across the whole poem.) 'Back' is one of Ewart's more tender poems – and here is another, one to appeal to any cat-lover –

A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter

I want him to have another living summer,
to lie in the sun and enjoy the douceur de vivre – 
because the sun, like golden rum in a rummer, 
is what makes an idle cat un tout petit peu ivre – 

I want him to lie stretched out, contented,
revelling in the heat, his fur all dry and warm,
an old age pensioner, retired, resented
by no one, and happiness in a beelike swarm

to settle on him – postponed for another season
that last fated hateful journey to the vet
from which there is no return (and age the reason),
which must soon come – as I cannot forget.