Out Patients

In the street, cold tranquility, traffic,
Yellow lines and wind from the east.

The hospital grounds lie green,
I remember, and the blossom,
Such as it is, pale red;
Too early in the season for warmth
With the vigorous chill of a sea-wind blowing.

Out of waiting rooms the walking wounded
Come and go; stooping battalions
On stick or crutch; broken bones and accidents
Rub against the creaking old:

Crepitus of time:
I hear its scratching dryness,
Time’s advance scraping the surface
The wearing away of perfections.

Corridors lead nowhere or lead
Everywhere to wards and theatres;
While, in pastel consulting rooms
The many are gathered to consult.

Somewhere in the air, the scent of handwash;
The machinery of healing runs silent now:
Walls concealed it among twisted wires.

Sometimes you can hear the subsonic knitting
Of broken bones, of cells responding
To treatment. The scuff of hands laid on;
The care that defies diagnosis;
Tender love beneath the uniforms.

They wander in and out, outpatients,
Their streets forsaken for a while;
Well enough, never better.

I lie back and think of home,
The kind of belonging that pain
Can unexpectedly inspire, or unimaginably
Erode. I hear the air rush in my ears
The dull tinnitus of time, unsure if
Inspiration is what it whispers.

I am leaving through the endless crowd’s
Coming and going, through the stuccos
And the bandages, the walking frames,
Past trolleys and drifting faces.

The cold wind, no longer tranquil, and the street,
No longer so empty, hurries me away.
The sea-wind from far away finds me.

© BH, 2016

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It was cold even though the sun was shining. The bus was a long time coming. Only a routine appointment, routine maintenance, really. Ten minutes, tops. But then, a hospital is one of those places where we meet vulnerability. If not our own that of others. I tried to capture what I had briefly imagined. I had a bus in my future and a stop to find it by. Despite the wind, I had a notebook to write in. As it happened, I had time.

The image here, I took from that very bus-stop. The car and the brickwork people, came later.