Night Sister - by
How is it possible not to grow hard,
To build a shell around yourself when you
Have to watch so much pain, and hear it too?
Tools of the Trade
Recovery Room - by
The noise in the recovery room
/ Was half footfall and half hum
/
/ Like a well-mannered gallery
/ Of pictures that I could not see.
/
/ And…
From ‘Doing Calls on the Old Portpatrick Road’ - by
12 Graham’s Landing
/ ‘The ear says more
/ Than any tongue’
/
/ I thought I spoke the language
/ asking what the matter was, the wrong.
/ I only…
From A Year and a Day: 19 October 1979 – 19 October 1980 - by
To be taken in small doses as required
/
/ October
/
/ 25: Miss G -, born while Queen Victoria was still alive,
/ standing proudly…
tender - by
when I look around me
/ the world is very bright
/
/ it is so light and shiny
/ that my long bones shiver
/
/ I am not…
The Guest House - by
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
The Door - by
Go and open the door.
/ Maybe outside there’s
/ …
A Medical Education - by
for Dr Peter Rothwell
/
/ In obstetrics I learnt that a woman opens swiftly like an elevator door.
/ The body wriggles free…
A Tight-Rope Act - by
Holding our breath
/ in apprehension,
/ we grasp life.
/ …
Tools of the Trade - by
New doctors will be empowered by poems
/ in the pockets of their metaphorical white coats.
/ There at the ready:
/ on early, sweaty,…
Increasingly sophisticated methods of divination used in the practice of medicine - by
By observing a rooster pecking grain.
/ By the various behaviours of birds.
/ By balancing a stone on a red-hot axe.
/ By the shape…