In the tendrils of their care I leaf and learn again.
Life’s better for knowing them they’re fun, down to earth, so young.
I may be mother, but now I’m utterly dependent.
They wash me, change me, talk to me, wipe away the spills and tears clean pin-sites, understand but do not pander to my pain.
Every morning they pile up pillows to lift me higher, an arm under each elbow and one around my waist, until a new patient, more ill than me under investigation grabs their attention.
At once they are strangers.
Like cattle at dusk their faces loom in the half-light, voices low as they struggle with tubes and pumps to save a life.
I’m left alone – abandoned – riding the rocking horse of jealousy unable to understand anything as violence erupts and threatens to topple.
In 1987 Cicely Herbert spent three months in University College Hospital after a serious road accident in Camden Town, London. She is one of the trio who founded and run Poems on the Underground.
This poem is published in In Hospital. Two Poem Sequences 100 Years Apart by Cicely Herbert and W.E. Henley (Katabasis, London 1992). The book is dedicated to all who work in the National Health Service.