After visiting a nursing home

from w
I wrote this a few year's ago after visiting my elderly mother when she was in Special Care at the Swan Hill District Hospital. She had all her faculties but her body let her down and yet lived amidst a variety of elderly patients who had dementia and various disabilities.  I  sympathised with the men and women there, though I barely understood their situation, being  able-bodied myself then.

Waking in the Night

The nurse, a new migrant

rouses from the nest of duty,

props her ‘New Wife’s Kiss’ on her desk,

cat-limps down the corridor to my bell.

An azure night mocks, making the hours bleaker

as a car skids on an icy highway.

His absence, their absence,

my heart grows still,

perhaps they are just busy.

This is the House of God in waiting.

What use is my former humour

as Telemus scoots by in his chair

shouting for his Mana.

He’s half my age but there’d been an accident

in Greece. No more fish and chips for him.

With the build of a strong athlete

he wheels himself, shouting out ‘Mana!’

Wearing his bright beanie by sun or moon.

he shares our bathroom,

urinous from the constant drips in us

Legless or mindless, cut off

at the knees or from words,

this is our day in a four-bed ward.

The nursing station lights bring out Sylvia,

porcupine eyes, with a tray of pills

without labels that we can read.

No-one notices I hide them all.

She is unfit, roly-poly as a seal

As she swashbuckles about in her tight uniform

removing the residue of our supper.

There is no bravado left in us,

no dignity as they strip us bare

In a pubic shame.

In between the limits of each day,

Hours go by under a  banal television

and one slightly nonsensical Alzeimers

pushes a chair as a vaccuum.

He’s forgotten by attendants at teabreak.

There are many like so

in this Special Care Unit.

After a cardboard breakfast

I weigh sixty kilos this morning.

Once I walked miles at golf,

strutted in my turtle-necked sweater

before the smooth bedroom mirror.

Now the future is less familiar

And I am just a pinched face

amidst these declining thoroughbreds

near my age, some twice my weight.

We are all old-timers, senior citizens,

Some of us locked in memory

And I now wake in fright.