Poetry
Please click on the links below to read any poem of your choice. I'll be adding more poems over time.
The Broken System
This was written in 2021 during a recent trip to hospital with a painful and scary heart arrhythmia. The only way to stay sane was to write (once the morphine had taken effect). There was no room in majors which is where I should have been taken; all wards full, hospital on Black Alert. I’m left in a wheelchair without appropriate medical assistance for ten hours. No food. Just water and a toilet.
The Broken System
Accident and Emergency is exam-room quiet.
Breathing softly behind masks, people wait.
Socially distanced rows of patience and pain.
Sighs of despair fall like the scratching of pens on paper.
The tense concentration of endurance.
A policeman stands guard — a tattooed statue behind his subdued charge.
People slump, held upright only by the lines of their drips.
Time ticks.
The night deepens.
The world sleeps, but the bright lights of the waiting room
Hold our eyelids open like matchsticks.
At least an eight hour wait, they say.
Yesterday it was fifteen.
No beds. No trolleys. No bays.
Ambulances banked up for hours in the carpark.
Black Alert.
Should I give up and go?
Should I run?
Risk my heart by going home untreated?
No. Stay put.
Stay with the sanitiser, the whispers and the moans.
A door opens. We all look up, hopeful. Desperate.
Nurses pad back and forth in soft shoes, their plastic aprons rustling like the turning of pages.
A name is called.
Not a register of attendance but a call to triage.
Then the wait continues.
The endless wait in the Broken System, where care is no longer possible and people suffer.
When it all collapses, they can build it up from Sharp Scratch and call it business.
Last Request
This is adapted from an anonymous poem about letting your loved one go. I've kept the original first verse and continued the poem in my own words.
If it should be that I grow frail and weak,
And pain should keep me from my sleep,
This day, more than all the rest,
Your love and friendship stand the test.
Take me where they’ll stop the pain,
And with me to the last remain.
Hold me, gentle, special friend.
Hold me till I reach the end.
Hold my trusting, tiny paw.
Hold me till I breathe no more.
Even though your heart cries, No!
When the time comes,
Let me go.
You’ve cared for me for all these years,
So try to put aside your fears
And do one last, brave deed for me.
Hold me,
Love me,
Set me free.
Rescue Dog
This is inspired by a true event
A warm summer's evening and time to take a stroll,
To catch the rays of setting sun as Betty sniffs grass verges.
But neighbours stop my heart mid-beat,
Pointing down the street to a house on fire,
A dog trapped inside!
The crowd gathers on the green.
Watching, praying, as firemen
Push the dog's dad away
From the obscene black, smoking door of his house.
The man collapses on the grass,
Weeping.
We wait, each second an eternity.
Then we sigh as one,
Releasing breath held far too long
As an angel in a breathing mask emerges,
Wreathed in dust and flame,
Holding a bundle in his arms like a baby.
The dad rushes forward,
Wetting the smoke choked ears and nose with tears.
The dog is lowered gently down.
A sturdy tail wags thump, thump, thump, upon the ground,
Starting my heart again.
Betty
Part Labrador, part Alsatian, part Collie, part Otter,
Smooth, round and sleek,
Betty slips into the waters of my life.
From pencil-thin tail to wagging flag,
From chasing squirrels to slow, gentle walks,
From 10 inches tip to toe, to can't lift her,
She rolls my heart in her paws like a pebble.
