This poem is part of the Poems for doctors project. You can find out more about the project here.

Season 2 : poem 6

Medical lecturer Gillian Strugnell reads Recovery Room by Patricia Beer

Recovery Room

Patricia Beer

The noise in the recovery room
Was half footfall and half hum

Like a well-mannered gallery
Of pictures that I could not see.

And then a name disrupted it:
The hated name of childhood: Pat,

A name I had not answered to
For fifty years and would not now.

Another voice began to talk:
Pat. And still I did not speak.

My husband waited in my room
And in the end they sent for him,

After an hour or two of this.
I heard Patricia. And said ‘Yes?’

Rights: by permission of Carcanet Press

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This poem is part of the Poems for doctors project. You can find out more about the project here.

Season 2 : poem 5

Medical Demonstrator Eilish Hannah reads At Eighty by Edwin Morgan

At Eighty

Edwin Morgan

Push the boat out, compañeros,
push the boat out, whatever the sea.
Who says we cannot guide ourselves
through the boiling reefs, black as they are,
the enemy of us all makes sure of it!
Mariners, keep good watch always
for that last passage of blue water
we have heard of and long to reach
(no matter if we cannot, no matter!)
in our eighty-year-old timbers
leaky and patched as they are but sweet
well seasoned with the scent of woods
long perished, serviceable still
in unarrested pungency
of salt and blistering sunlight. Out,
push it all out into the unknown!
Unknown is best, it beckons best,
like distant ships in mist, or bells
clanging ruthless from stormy buoys.

Rights: from Cathures: New Poems 1997-2001 (Carcanet Press Ltd, 2002), with permission of the publisher

A moderated Facebook group hosts discussion for medics and others who would like to follow up on ideas arising from ‘Poems for Doctors’.

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This poem is part of the Poems for doctors project. You can find out more about the project here.

Season 2 : poem 3

Consultant Neurologist Prof John Zajicek reads Multiple Sclerosis by Cynthia Huntington

Multiple Sclerosis

Cynthia Huntington

For ten years I would not say the name.
I said: episode. Said: setback, incident,
exacerbation—anything but be specific
in the way this is specific, not a theory
or description, but a diagnosis.
I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue.
I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm.
Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit.

But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused.
There are two words. The last one means: scarring.
It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired.
The first one means: repeating, or myriad,
consisting of many parts, increasing in number,
happening over and over, without end.

Rights: by permission of Four Way Books

A moderated Facebook group hosts discussion for medics and others who would like to follow up on ideas arising from ‘Poems for Doctors’.

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This poem is part of the Poems for doctors project. You can find out more about the project here.

Season 2 : poem 3

Medical Demonstrator Wojciech Cymes reads From the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh by Andrew Greig

From the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

Andrew Greig

My only talent lay in these.
My father rubbed his hands together,
stared as though their whorls held codes
of thirty years obstetric surgery.
It’s a manual craft – the rest’s just memory
and application. The hard art
lies in knowing when to stop.

He curled his fingers like a safe-cracker
recalling a demanding lock;
I glimpse a thousand silent break-ins:
the scalpel’s shining jemmy pops
a window in the body, then – quick! –
working in the dark remove or
re-arrange, clean up, quit,
seal the entrance. Oh strange burglar
who leaves things better than he found them!
On good days it seemed my fingertips
could see through skin, and once inside
had little lamps attached, that lit
exactly how and where to go.
He felt most kin to plumbers, sparks and joiners,
men whose hands would speak for them.

I wander through the college, meet
portraits of those names he’d list,
Simpson, Lister, Wade and Bell,
the icons of his craft, recalled
as though he’d known them personally.
Impossible, of course. Fingers don’t see.
Yet it gave me confidence, so I could proceed.

I stare at the College coat of arms,
that eye wide-open in the palm,
hear his long-dead voice, see again
those skilful hands that now are ash;
working these words I feel him by me,
lighting up the branching pathways.
Impossible, of course, and yet it gives
me confidence. We need
to believe we are not working blind;
with his eye open in my mind
I open the notebook and proceed.

Rights: from This Life, This Life: New and selected poems 1970-2006 (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), reproduced by permission of the publisher.

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