I make you well
With grinding powders
Oils and solutions
Shredded herbs steeped
Till the water is green
And aromatic
I tilt your lips to the crucible
I bring you past the crisis
Make you whole
In the small hours my work is done
I imagine breathing air and peace
Dispel the vapours of disease and crank
The left-over taint of dispensation
Then there is sleep
Its dreams repeating
Apothecary cure
Your own ills
Some leached into the crushed stems
Into the remedy itself some of me
Joined with you in the mending
My dreaming hands grip tight
On the levers of night-time
Trying to pull back pieces of myself
From whatever anthropic threads
Make them know how to knit
Skin and bone
I restore my scatterings
Splashes of myself sublimated in air or hidden
Dried by sun misted on the wind
I restore myself from the hundred places
My fevered energies fled to in the day
I imagine myself
As you are
While the dawn
Its light returning
Restores us
On display
Bottles of liquid colour
Brown woodworked shelves
Small jars in rows
Blue brown and clear
Tinctures infusions distillates
Essences extracts mixtures
Good health a solution
To be dispensed
Given away
© BH, 2017
Iatrogenic. There's a word I’ve used before. An ailment caused by a physician's intervention: clinical addictions, hospital acquired infections and the like. It's how we can become sick through whatever is meant to make us well. More of the same in White Rabbit from July 2016.
But, I wondered, how do the medics of our lives recover from what healing us does to them? I've spent enough time around alternative practitioners to know how drained they become through the laying on of hands, the rebalancing of our chaotic energies, clicking bone, sinew and spirit back into alignment with the merest gesture.
Exhausting. The apothecary's soul is in those bottles. Don't forget, for every pill you swallow, some human touch has weighed it, measured it, labelled it with gentle pressure of the fingers.
Sleep, should it ever come, is where healing begins.
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