Into our room
clanking and rattling
spinning and whirling
sliding and wheeling
come trolleys
chairs
trays
stretchers
beds
drips
pills
linen
basins
and patients.
Hospitals run
on wheels.
Credit note: This untitled poem by Trish Harris is reproduced by permission of the author from her collection My wide white bed (Landing Press, 2017). For more information and to buy copies of My wide white bed, go to https://landingpress.wordpress.com/upcoming-titles/my-wide-white-bed/ . Books are available from the website and all good bookstores for $22.
Tim says: I would have enjoyed and been moved by the poems in My wide white bed at any time, but it was an especially poignant reading experience for me this year after both my father and I had stints in hospital during 2017 – his, unfortunately, terminal.
My Dad spent the last two weeks of his life in Hutt Hospital, which is the same hospital that provides the closely observed backdrop of Trish’s poems. So I can say from personal experience that what Trish Harris describes in this poem, and the confusing mixture of the personal and the impersonal one experiences as a hospital patient or even as a the visitor of a hospital patient, rings very true to life.
