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.
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 till violence envelops and threatens to topple.
Published in In Hospital, poems by Cicely Herbert and W. E. Henley (Katabasis, London 1992). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.