Take One Visitor And Call Me In The Morning

I wander these hospital corridors

searching for your room,

past the old and infirm

or the very young and equally infirm,

and then those on a sun-lit veranda,

with the smiles and hot tea of the recovering.

Nurses rush by, uniforms snapping like fingers.

Doctors are more pensive,

always the stethoscope hung around the throat,

the chart in hand,

reading vital signs and symptoms

like clues in an Agatha Christie mystery.

The visitor is the odd one out in all of this.

What do I know that could be of use to anyone?

When am I ever held in respect?

I finally find the right ward,

your bed, and your sorry self

sat up by pillows, reading a newspaper,

while the woman in the bed next to you

glows like a bud centering petals of extended family.

You have on your glad-to-see-me-face.

And I don't force pills down your throat.

That's a relief.

And whatever your temperature, I'm happy with it.

Nor do I listen to your heart.

At least, not in any clinical way.

I just sit myself down in a bedside chair

and we talk, we laugh..

You entrust your good health with me,

your sickness with these others.

When Reading To A Son

I fall asleep before you do,

nodding in a chair while you're

wide-awake, staring at the ceiling,

wondering how the story finishes.

You'll have to end it yourself,

in your head, like I did

when my father dozed

while reading to me.

So go on with the tale,

even if my voice is no longer

there with you.

Stay with the good guy.

It’s best if he

slays the villain,

rescues the princess,

saves the day.

But if he falls asleep.

Well that’s okay too.

Desert Rain

Three intensely hot days after two of heavy rain.

Foliage holds hard to freshly gained greenery

as the harsh sun exacts due payment.

In other latitudes,

weather systems pass each other

peacefully in the night.

Here, they clash.

Light wrestles dark.

Dry tussles with wet.

The air is an open wound.

It oozes flies not blood.