Seven lines, no capital letters, almost no punctuation, and the poem still manages to change subject in the middle of a sentence. It begins with a piece of social commentary, "the man in the street so / many disturbed // persons / in married life," and then turns to a bird and some boys. The poem never explains the connection. That gap is where its meaning sits.
The first part sounds like a scrap of talk caught in passing. "The man in the street" is a stock phrase for the ordinary, average person, and "so many disturbed persons in married life" has the tone of a general remark, the kind people make about other people's lives. The line breaks work against its confidence. "So" dangles at the end of the first line, and "many disturbed" stops at the stanza break, so for a moment "disturbed" is a complete state with nothing attached. Then "persons" arrives alone on its own line. The word is flat and almost official, as if the people had been turned into a category. Only afterward do we learn where the disturbance is placed: "in married life," the most private setting there is, now discussed in the language of the street.
Then comes the swerve. "That bird there, it's a gull?" is the longest line, and it sounds the most like real speech, with a comma for a breath and a question mark for doubt. The contrast is sharp. The sweeping claim about marriage was stated flatly, while the small, visible thing, a bird right there, needs a question mark. The poem seems to be asking what we are actually sure of. We can pronounce on "so many" strangers' troubles, yet we hesitate over a bird we can see.
The last two lines complete the turn: "the boys are / mimicking it." The break after "are" leaves the action unfinished, and "mimicking" is a present participle, so the imitation is still going on as we read. The poem doesn't say what the boys copy, whether the gull's cry or its movements, so the reader fills that in. Whatever it is, the boys' play is physical and unselfconscious, and it answers the abstract, worried talk that opened the poem.
Sound ties the pieces together even where the sense does not. The letter m runs through the poem: "man," "many," "married," "mimicking." The word that closes the poem echoes the word that sits at the heart of its first half. That repetition suggests an idea the poem never states. Marriage, with its habits and roles, is also a kind of imitation, and the boys are rehearsing the human habit of copying what they see. I offer this as a reading, not a fact. The poem only places the words near each other and lets them resonate.
The form helps this along. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and uneven, and their length follows how the voice or the eye moves, not a pattern. The two stanzas, a short one of two lines and a longer one of five, also work like a shift of attention. The title is only a number and what looks like a date, "Apr 2 67." That makes the poem read like a dated entry, a note of what was noticed on one particular day, not a finished statement about life.
That is where the significance lies. The poem trusts juxtaposition more than explanation. It sets a social generalization beside a living moment and leaves out any bridge between them, so we feel how a mind in a street takes things in, with talk, sights, doubts, and a boy's imitation of a bird all arriving in the same moment. Each reader must decide whether the boys' mimicry mocks the grown-up gloom, escapes it, or quietly continues it. By ending on the boys instead of resolving anything, the poem suggests that experience comes in pieces, and that noticing them carefully may matter more than explaining them.