Peter Adair’s Hospital Poems

With visitors Colin Dardis @rancid.idols and Geraldine O’Kane @geraldine_okane_poet. The vast hospital site merges with the hills which, one day, will reclaim man’s ephemeral buildings. Not just yet.

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Thanks to all who sent me their well wishes during my eight weeks in hospital. They helped me through an incarceration that seemed unending. Now I am like a man released from prison. It takes time to readapt to not being fed, watered and drugged. I value the simple wonders: to walk when and where I wish, to open and close my front door, cook a meal, feel the strangeness of shopping, and surprise that people don’t feel blessed going about their daily lives.

.

the door opens

a firm handshake

with the man with no fingers

(I was friendly with a man in his seventies who, in his thirties, lost his fingers and legs due to sepsis.)

mother’s 30-year plant

still flowers in winter

new blood in an old body

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Hearing Aid

At six o’clock the shower’s hiss, the first duet of flushing toilets,
smokers’ coughs; the first voices – that manic voice that chatters all day,
the Chinaman who shouts Jesus H Christ, Jesus H Christ,
the cry of Medication, Dinner, Tea and Toast.
And then the first steps of endless steps: slow sad steps,
shuffling steps, steps echoing in the smoky stairwell.
And then the food trolley clattering down the corridor
like an outsize biscuit tin; the clash of lids, knives
scraping butter on toast, tea trickling into a bored cup,
silence dripping between mouthfuls. Or all day long
the bleep bleep bleep that frees doors for nurses, shuts doors
in our faces (Oh to be a code breaker tapping out that forbidden code!).
Or the morning splash and whisk of the cleaning lady’s
mop and bucket. And in the dayroom, where the television
blasts all day, the rippling pages of a thriller being turned
– a boredom killer; a pen scratching out letters to God (address unknown)’
the rustle of yesterday’s Sun. And then the groaning curtains
pulled at night – night with its claustrophobic farts, coughs, burps;
the Chinaman shouting It’s a full moon. It’s a full moon.
And in his bay with five strangers the writer, alone,
his bed slightly creaking as he sighs, mutters to himself,
slams shut his notebook and clicks off the light.

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Poem on St Stephen’s Day

No birthday cake, no birthday cards
today: You are as old as you feel…
or as the hills. The Blue Danube lapping
the ward, I waltz towards the nurses,
swallow my pills like a good old boy.

Nearing seventy I must find some light –
dim as it is – among these broken ones,
the lost souls of the ward – I, a lucky
baby the doctors tossed from hand to hand.
Or blow out the candles from sixty years ago.

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Love Yourself More

You, doctor, stanch the wound, the hole in the self,
the gash. But please, let me not heal
with too much healing, not heal like these:

the boss whose little finger dashes underlings to pieces,
the reverend in his pulpit bible-bashing souls,
the politician like a prefect throttling my brain,
the suicide bomber grinning and fondling his faith,
the Great Leader digging the graves of forty-million people.

No, doctor, let me not heal like these:

the genius being born in Kazakhstan or China
who will refine a chemical that eliminates doubt,
pains of conscience, sickness unto death,
the sympathy gene;

that liquidates the lunatick and sore vexed,
that dries all tears and makes the last enemy die,
that brings heaven to earth and raises earth to heaven,
that makes paintings, makes symphonies, makes poems

obsolete.

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Peter Adair’s poems have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Boyne Berries, A New Ulster and other journals.  He has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. A poem is included in Eyewear’s The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021. An e-pamphlet Calling Card is available from Rancid Idol Productions and Amazon. He worked at a number of jobs, from labouring to bookselling. He lives in Bangor, Co Down.