Offerings–poems by doctors

On the ward Christmas gleams in glittering delirium.

She and I; the last awake, sit half watching the TV,

the fallen side of her face cast

in the cyanosed glow of a school nativity.

Tonight she does not speak of the sun's rays burning through her,

the hum of electricity in her mind,

of gods or other devils.

I had a baby, she says

as simply as one might offer milk with tea

or spread out a clean sheet.

He was taken from me.

I know these things, on paper,

in files,

unauthored statements of fact

handed down, unquestioned,

and unasked.

Almost biblical;

her thirty volumes of loss.

But I do not know the sorrow,

the neat, coherent stab of it.

I reach for her

And blindly graze the mollusk sheen of her forearm,

the pearly edge of scars.

I cannot bear to look at the exquisite truth –

the shear and shimmering grief

garishly illuminated with each pulse of fairy lights;

red, yellow, blue.

My bleep chimes;

the false release of someone else's need.

I mumble empty-handed apologies

and her expression returns to a blunt vacancy.

In that instant she closes like a seam;

caving inward to her muted shelter,

away from the taunting chorus of other people's children.

In the corridor the soft procession of dinner trolleys depart,

the distant carol of crockery sinks underwater

and I rush winded into the barren night.