'Visiting Hour' by Norman MacCaig



Visiting Hour

 

 The hospital smell

       combs my nostrils

       as they go bobbing along

       green and yellow corridors.

 

5      What seems a corpse

       is trundled into a lift and vanishes

       heavenward.

 

       I will not feel, I will not

       feel, until

10     I have to.

 

       Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,

       here and up and down and there,

       their slender waists miraculously

       carrying their burden

15     of so much pain, so

       many deaths, their eyes

       still clear after

       so many farewells.

 

       Ward 7. She lies

20     in a white cave of forgetfulness.

       A withered hand

       trembles on its stalk. Eyes move

       behind eyelids too heavy

       to raise. Into an arm wasted

25     of colour a glass fang is fixed,

       not guzzling but giving.

       And between her and me

       distance shrinks till there is none left

       but the distance of pain that neither she nor I

30     can cross.

 

       She smiles a little at this

       black figure in her white cave

       who clumsily rises

       in the round swimming waves of a bell

35     and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,

       not smaller, leaving behind only

       books that will not be read

       and fruitless fruits.

 

Norman MacCaig

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