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A Message

Olive M. Ritch

One of the best of minds
destroyed by dementia

does not howl on her knees
in the street, does not masturbate

in the magnolia living-room,
is not dragged off the roof-top,

naked; no, she leaves a message
on her daughter’s answer-phone

saying: there’s an echo,
an echo in my head.


Olive M. Ritch

Previously published in 2011 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Bodmin and King’s Lynn: Top Edge Press, 2011) and The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202:5 (May 2013). Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

dementia telephones Tools of the Trade editors' selection

About this poem

Orcadian poet Olive M. Ritch has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies including Agenda, Causeway / Cabhsair, The Hippocrates Prize 2011, The Poetry Cure and Don’t Bring Me No Rocking Chair. She received a commendation in the National Poetry Competition 2003 and won the Calder Prize for Poetry at the University of Aberdeen in 2006.

This poem is one of the editors’ highlighted selection of poems from an open call for readers’ proposals from the second edition of Tools of the Trade: Poems for new doctors.

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