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Poems in the Waiting Room
Autumn 2009
Hymn to Diana
Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep;
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breath, how short so ever:
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright.
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
How to Know the Days of the Week
Experienced men, inured to city ways,
Need not the Calendar to count their days.
When through the town with slow and solemn air,
Led by the nostril, walks the muzzled bear;
Behind him moves majestically dull,
The pride of Hockley-hole, the surly bull;
Learn hence the periods of the week to name,
Mondays and Thursdays are the days of the game.
When fishy stalls with double store are laid;
The golden bellied carp, the broad-finn'd maid,
Red-speckled trouts, the salmon's silver jowl,
The jointed lobster, and unscaley sole,
And lucious 'scallops to allure the tastes
Of rigid zealots to delicious fasts;
Wednesdays and Fridays you'll observe from hence,
Days, when our sires were doom'd to abstinence.
When dirty waters from balconies drop,
And dext'rous damsels twirl the sprinkling mop,
And cleanse the spattered sash, and scrub the stairs;
Know Saturday's conclusive morn appears.
John Gay (1685-1732)
Autumn
I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the mossy elm-tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane.
I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve,
The sparrow on the cottage rig,
Whose chirp would make believe
That spring was just now flirting by
In summer's lap with flowers to lie.
I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the trees,
The pigeons nestled round the cote
On November days like these;
The cock upon the dunghill crowing,
The mill-sails on the heath a-going.
The feather from the raven's breast
Falls on the stubble lea,
The acorns near the old crow's nest
Drop pattering down the tree;
The grunting pigs, that wait for all,
Scramble and hurry where they fall.
John Clare (1793-1864)
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Staff Nurse: Old Style
The greater masters of the commonplace,
Rembrandt and good Sir Walter - only these
Could paint her all to you: experienced ease
And antique liveliness and ponderous grace;
The sweet old roses of her sunken face;
The depth and malice of her sly, gray eyes;
The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies;
The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace.
These thirty years has she been nursing here,
Some of them under Syme, her hero still.
Much is she worth, and even more is made of her.
Patients and students hold her very dear.
The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill.
They say 'The Chief' himself is half-afraid of her.
Staff Nurse: New Style
Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast
Into the sere of virginal decay,
I view her as she enters, day by day,
As a sweet sunset almost overpast.
Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,
Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,
And on her chignon's elegant array
the plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.
She talks Beethoven; frowns disapprobation
At Balzac's name, sighs it at 'poor George Sand's';
Knows she has exceeding pretty hands;
Speaks Latin with a right accentuation;
And gives at need (as one who understands)
Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.
William Earnest Henley (1849-1903)
Patient of Royal Infirmary Edinburgh 1883-1875
William Earnest Henley is a special interest for Poems in the Waiting Room as an example of health and art. He suffered from tuberculosis of the bone as a child which his left leg below the knee to be amputated. His friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, based Treasure Island's Long John Silver on him. Later in life, Henley's right foot became infected. Henley contested the diagnosis that a second amputation was the only way to save his life by becoming a patient of the pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister at The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Lister's treatment effected a complete cure, enabling Henley to return to thirty more years active life, and giving the world a wealth of splendid poetry.
The Royal Infirmary Edinburgh is part of Poems in the Waiting Room for Hospitals, with a special print of each edition for the Hospital's staff and patients, sponsored by The Patient Information Centre Royal Infirmary Edinburgh and NHS Lothian Patient and Public Partnership Network.
A Leaf Falling
The stem snaps off, brittle
as a wafer - another sycamore
half-star on its way to collapse
its yellow ribs on the ground.
Not yet: as it slaloms the air
it calls the whole valley to attention -
the glacier's green withheld ghosts,
the breaker's yard of the moraine,
the peaks fat with sunlight.
They attend to a silence which covers
all the leaf's lilting fall:
long enough to contain
the cry of a newborn child
crossing the threshold
into the dazzle, the shadows beyond.
Lawrence Sail (1942 -
lives in Exeter. His most recent collection is Eye-Baby(Bloodaxe Books, 2006). To come in 2010 are Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems(Bloodaxe) and Songs of the Darkness: Poems for Christmas, with illustrations by his daughter, Erica Sail (Enitharmon). He is a freelance writer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
"The leaf in the poem was drifting down on a wooded slope near Chamonix on a bright, clear autumn day. There seemed something magical about catching the moment at which it detached itself from the branch, and about the context of silence. The half-star and the child's cry look forward to Christmas.
At the Level of Hems
When small dogs are permitted
in dark vintage shops
they find at the level of hems
more than we can know
who look at fraying collars, faded colours
and indecipherable price tags
we who only think of bargains
novelties or a talking piece
miss life at the level of hems
where linen smells of small rooms
and cotton is a field
where lovers run between
bubbling creeks and find their way
in muddy unmarked hollows
where mended cuffs and crankshaft oil
smell of a hard day
and tiny threads of silk are pulled
where the hemming needle slipped.
Ann Nadge (1949 -
born in Adelaide in 1949, and is a former deputy headmistress in Sydney, Australia. She has recently started a new phase of her life back in Adelaide where she was educated. Having traveled extensively, she now spends time in a number of endeavors including sessional work for the University of Adelaide and her work on Schools ministry. She has four collections of poetry published by Ginninderra Press in Canberra, one of the few Australian publishers who still promotepoetry. Corrugations was published in 2003, Fence Music in 2004 and Shifting Light in 2006, and Occupying Silence in 2007 She has also been published in the Southern Ocean Review (N.Z) and the Methuen Book of Poems for Everyday (Methuen U.K 2005), and has contributed to an anthology of reflections on the work of Jane Austen - Jane Austen: Antipodean Views.
In addition to poetry, she has published several academic articles, following research whilst an associate in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She also writes for special occasions including A Blessing Be Told which was performed in the Sydney Opera House in December 2000,andHis Living Wings Upholding on the occasion of the sesquicentenary of St Catherine's Anglican School for Girls in March, 2006.
Ann has previously been involved in a poems for hospitals project, and is now looking into beginning the Australian Poems in the Waiting Room in conjunction with the original UK scheme.
Not Even the wet rustle of rain
can dampen today. Your letter
buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles
like a paper boat, so that even
soaked to the skin,
I am grinning.
Ben Ziman-Bright (1983-
born in London and first came to notice as a poet when, aged 18, he was named a prize-winner in the Poetry Society's Foyles Young Poets of the Year. In 2004, while reading English at the University of Birmingham, Ben's poem Rhapsody was a prize winner in the Young Poets on the Underground contest and was subsequently exhibited across the London Underground. Rhapsody has since been used as an exam text in Ireland for the English Higher 2007 paper by tens of thousands of students. Since then, Ben's poetry has gained wider recognition and has been published in a variety of literary journals including Magma and The Liberal.
Not Even was originally the winning entry for the 2007 for poems short enough to fit in one text message, although his was one of the very few not written in 'text speak'. Ben now works as a legal professional in London and continues to write poetry and take part in readings and workshops across the capital.
PitWR Editor Isobel Montgomery Campbell
The biographical notes are taken from the PitWR Friends Newsletter Autumn 2009 |
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