Noticing is the quiet action at the centre of Amy's poem. Cecile, a girl so wrapped up in her own world that she walks "Everywhere, everyday," suddenly sees a woman she has passed without seeing before. Curiosity turns into a small, shy act of kindness: a hot cross bun left on a bench with an apology attached. The poem's central idea is that being seen is itself a gift, and that attention can matter more than the present it comes wrapped in. The last line, "Someone did notice her," is only five words long, and the whole poem builds towards it.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and very short lines, many of them fragments. Its rhythm comes from repetition. The refrain "She walks" returns in the present tense, even though the stanza began in the past ("Cecile walked"). The effect is of a daily loop, a routine so fixed that it seems to happen outside time. The verbs of movement then trace Cecile's change of mood. She whistles "to her own tune," skips past Noreen, later "stomped" while she "thought. / And thought." and finally "walked, / Skipped" to the bench. The stomping is the most revealing of these. Judging by the context, it suggests that Cecile's curiosity has become restless and a little uncomfortable, and that she cannot simply walk past anymore.
The imagery is sensory and seasonal. Overhead are "swirling silvers and golds," the bakeries give off "ginger treats" and "festive scents," and the lights "glimmered / Twinkled," each verb given its own line so that the light seems to blink. Against all this movement and glitter, Noreen is still: "Sitting, / At peace." The poem never says why she is there, and that silence works in its favour. It keeps our attention on Cecile's gesture rather than on a backstory. We might infer that the holiday bustle makes Noreen's stillness easier to notice, and perhaps lonelier, but the poem leaves that for the reader to decide.
The poem also plays with point of view. Cecile asks three questions in a row ("Who was she? / Who did she watch? / Why was she there?"), and a few lines later the same wording comes back from the other side: "Who was this girl?" Only here, in Noreen's own thoughts, does the woman get a name, "dear old Noreen." Until then she is simply "a woman" and "her." She is named at the moment she becomes a person who looks back, and this shows that the noticing has been going both ways. That changes how we read the final line. Noreen is noticed by Cecile, but Cecile is also noticed by Noreen, and the girl in blue who thought she was walking through the world alone was being watched all along.
The ending is full of small, careful details. The bun is "nothing but a / Hot Cross Bun," and the line break and capital letters make it look as if it has been placed on the page like a gift. The word "cross" also links it to the crosswords Noreen likes, which is a quiet piece of wordplay. The poem never shows Cecile seeing the crosswords, so that observation must have happened in the gaps, in all the days of thinking. Her words are halting and polite: "I know it is not the season." Ginger treats belong to the holidays, while the bun does not. The gift therefore sits outside the calendar, and its kindness does not depend on a festive occasion. The speech has no closing punctuation, so it seems to trail off, as if Cecile is relieved just to have got it said. Even the capital H in "next to Her" seems to give Noreen a kind of dignity.
What makes the poem significant is how little it needs. There is no crisis, no rescue and no long speech, only a change in a child's attention. "Noreen Part II" in the title suggests a sequel, and I can't say what came before, but the poem stands on its own. It treats a bun and a sentence as a real event, and it suggests that the people we pass every day may be waiting for exactly that.