Poem

• The hospital smell / combs my nostrils / as they go bobbing along / green and yellow corridors.
• What seems a corpse / is trundled into a lift and vanishes / heavenward
• I will not feel, I will not / feel, until / I have to.
• Nurses walk lightly, swiftly, / here and up and down and there,
• their slender waists miraculously / carrying their burden / of so much pain, so / many deaths, their eyes / still clear after / so many farewells.
• Ward 7. She lies / in a white cave of forgetfulness.
• A withered hand / trembles on its stalk. Eyes move / behind eyelids too heavy / to raise. Into an arm wasted / of colour a glass fang is fixed, / not guzzling but giving.
• And between her and me / distance shrinks till there is none left / but the distance of pain that neither she nor I / can cross.
• She smiles a little at this / black figure in her white cave / who clumsily rises
• in the round swimming waves of a bell / and dizzily goes off, growing fainter, / not smaller, leaving behind only
• books that will not be read / and fruitless fruits.