Sleep’s doctoring hands withdrawn,
The patient wakes early:
His light-switch can still thrust away
Insinuating dawn.
He sees through his window-square
Fuzzed branches, buildings, grass,
Archway and path chiefly because
He knows that they are there.
But what at first he has seen
As candles searching a darkened
Crypt becomes a hurry of white-capped
Girls to their routine
Of healing. For every nurse –
Though never so devoted –
Death, birth, all the body’s dramas
Must be a matter of course.
Only the patient, weak
As a leaf, imagines their voices
A dawn chorus and his own
Experience unique.
1 First published in the Guy’s Hospital House Magazine in 1970. Drafted in an exercise book bought from the hospital trolley-shop.