In a Country Hospital

Somewhere in this brick building a woman in labor groans,

The morning is still dark.

But the robins’ clamor has started, and the ground-fog is rising,

(I had to get up to look.)

Two lamps at the hospital gate

Paint the green hedge with falseness

And the morning star is shining,

High, clear, fresher than dew

In the transparent wilderness overhead.

Soon day will come, with her plain clattering gold

And linen piled on carts, and smells of ether and coffee

Filling the wards and corridors, and the lamps and the star will go out.

We can hear the cries of the new-born, and a man coughing without relief,

We can hear sparrows rilling up out of the coolness into the eaves

And chirping there, loud and excited, as if it were their marketplace

We can hear the roar of the mile-away Atlantic floating beyond the town,

Beyond the wheat and potato-fields and the beach-grass and the dunes

Beyond the brackish ponds where the swans nest,

A shimmering mountain of praises, of crystal and thunder.

And to us, whose sweaty gowns stick to us,

Who are all twisted, who are all aching,

This Friday morning the blessed Eucharist was brought.