Poem

Cards (11)

  • 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.