The following are the short-listed 3 NHS-related and 3 Open entries in alphabetical order by title for the NHS and Open International Sections for the 2012 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine
http://hippocrates-poetry.org .
NHS-related
Allogeneic
I know the substance they have drawn
from me. I’ve felt it drip from razor-nicks
into the sink, put bloodied finger to my lips
and learned the taste of what I am,
bitter as walnuts and thinner than spit.
I lie awake and feel the clots, strung out
like threaded beads, bumping through
my veins, then dream of you, my sibling,
out there somewhere, twinned by crossmatch,
topping up your tanks with liquid me.
Take, then, the blood of my blood, typed
against type, all that I can spare and stay alive.
Beware the strange contagion of its brew,
and should a new affliction rise unheralded,
bubbling like Moët through your carotid,
it could be me, surprising you like hiccups
in the night, a sudden myoclonus that taps
my name in morse upon your diaphragm,
a benign infection, a voice you don’t know,
a cough or a thought you cannot shake.
NHS-related
Claybury
Before the lunatics could find asylum
there had to be this chess piece water tower
in Victorian high-gothic: five flights
up to a gabled tank kept out of sight
behind a frieze of blind lancet windows.
Clocklessly it supervised the regime
of cleanliness, its daily shadow sweep -
male chronic, male acute, male epileptic,
female epileptic, female acute, female chronic -
solstice to solstice as a century passed.
It drove the Roding Valley aquifer
along the branching copper axons,
down to the vast pressure cookers,
around the laundry's steam mangle,
inside laboratory condenser jackets,
through asbestos-lagged service tunnels,
out of the delouser's scalding nozzle,
into strapped baths for hydropathy,
enamel basins in the nurse's quarters,
patented cisterns and the chapel font.
It stood complicit in the autoclave's
preparation of stainless lobotomies;
knew the drip of insulin coma therapy;
kept silent while the beige Psychotron
washed a sad brain with threshold current.
And when the cold war tablets came -
Largactil, Acuphase, Seroquel -
it drained itself, glass by glass,
down the salt-glazed Doulton sewer pipes
into the Roding's sluggish sanity.
NHS-related
Mr Blatný Perseveres
He skips basket-weaving, writes wherever there’s light,
some privacy in a garden bench, a toilet.
Mr Blatný needs this institution,
needs asylum, needs it Styrofoam-muffled, away
from the piercing ding, ding:
'Next patient: would Mister?'
He’s not keen to go anywhere,
everyone rushing.
What he wants is nearer than anything they suggest,
danger collapses distance, questions are fists,
terror a remembered tinnitus
matron’s voice pitched as the last castrato in Brno
or blade of a skate.
What can Mr Blatný do?
He writes to get closer, muddling it to cope,
no point a new language without plurals, past, future,
he doesn’t need it sparer
but dense.
It’s necessary this cotton-wool protection
of English-Czech-French
or to connect,
it moves the border to where he wants, holds off
deranged woodpeckers and the tossers, their bulky suits,
blur of Slivovic and their bullying summonses,
he transforms feeling.
Love needn’t start from the palate
or stay on the tongue,
he changes its origin in the body:
'Lasko, miluji' shifts the heart
shifts him home.
For 'Je n’ai pas peur'
he can throw out his arms,
away from his folded-in plea for sanctuary.
(Ivan Ivan Blatný : Czech poet, born Brno 1919, emigrated to England 1948,
lived most of his last 30 years in various psychiatric hospitals in Essex, died 1990)
Open
Los Subiros
They call us Los Subiros, The Bringers.
What do we bring to the hospital on top of the mountain?
Everything. This morning in our backpacks we carry
oxygen masks and sponges, catheters and curettes.
We carry cervical traction tongs and bone roungers,
latex gloves and gouges, colonic irrigation sets.
We are laden with bags of flour and bottles of sterile water,
powdered milk and bedpans, kilos of bananas.
Cans of diesel for the generator hang from our belts.
For three hours we climb the steep and stony path,
keep our heads down, aware of the sharp edge
that plunges to the valley, the danger of falling rock.
We memorise all that we’ve signed for,
murmur to ourselves as we walk:
dilators, clamps, forceps, hooks, retractors, hemostats
mallets, knives, probes, shears, snares, speculums
We know it all by the time we glimpse the gleaming glass
of the hospital, its balconied bedrooms
reaching out to the mountain’s snowy peaks.
We queue to unload at Deliveries,
wait for the checking, take the handful of coins we are paid.
Not allowed in the cafe, we eat our bread and radishes
in the shade of the mortuary
smoke together, gaze at the sun,
splash our faces in the marble pool outside Reception.
Subiros! they call to us, and load us with debris
and broken furniture, soiled sheets and foodscraps,
gallstones and spleens and wombs in containers
marked Clinical Waste. The path is narrow
and slippery. We keep our heads down,
step aside only for the stretcher-bearers
and their cargos of blanketed bodies.
We try not to hear their groans,
notice if they are stiff or still.
Hard against the granite wall
we suck in our breath as they pass
Open
The Edwin Smith Papyrus
When word came, we rugged the humps, grabbed our flasks,
set off in pairs under an aching skull
of stars across the desert. There were risks,
true, but not going was riskier still.
It took the parched throat of three days to reach
the wind-shattered obelisks of Luxor --
its granite needle -- and two more to touch
the crumbling lips of the thing weíd come for:
an ancient weave of pith and soot-soaked wax --
seventeen leaves of fragile hieroglyph
fixed in incense, ochre and gum to coax
diseases from the body, dying from life.
These were the pharaoh's physician's secrets,
we were assured, silent for centuries --
a lost calculus for adding spirits
to salve, mapping the brain, suturing eyes.
We haggled hard for those illegible
rags, then slid a purse across the table,
loped back beneath an incorrigible
moon that turned our shadows to syllable.
Now, all that's left of me inflects the earth
as atoms, pixels, ghosts on an X-ray --
a loosening helix of rhyme whose worth
vibrates invisibly in the mind's eye.
Open
Women's Work
To make a heart from scratch, even tiny,
mouse-sized, she was surprised to find
that soap was best. No chemicals, reagents,
electrospinning, leaching: none of it
as good as common soap. The soap was best
for flesh. An elegant solution:
when concentrated in the lab,
the steady drip strips the donor heart
of once-living cells. A lung requires
hand-washing, the bluish marbled meat
dissolved, the pulmonary tree exposed,
the delicate hollows symmetrical, alveolar.
The liver is simpler, mere reduction, translucent
as tallow and ashes. The first soap
was gleaned from sacrifice. A thousand years ago,
she would have cast bones and entrails
to burn, boiled fat, scrabbled in the fire
for cinders. A body is made clean from the flesh
of another body. All around her, ghost hearts,
ghost lungs, faint superstructures of cartilage
glowing like radium. Today, she will deliver
life, infusing organ scaffolds with broth,
draping small galaxies in a swath of stars,
pluripotent tissue cells hung
like pale fabric. Not yet stained
with rude blood, her mouse heart waits
to beat, the lungs to breathe, silent
in amniotic glass, dumb life
re-assembling. Common as birth.
She could be making cutwork lace.
She could be on her knees to wash
the stillborn lamb for rendering.