In The Poetry » Dannie Abse

Pathology of colours

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:45:30 +0000

For years I practised as a doctor and eventually I managed to write poems that had a medical thrust to them. I used to be asked at poetry readings sometimes – “You’re a doctor but you don’t seem to write poems which have a medical undertone,” and I think I felt I ought to call upon my experience, however traumatic it might have been. And the first of the medical poems I really wrote was this one called ‘Pathology of colours’.

Pathology of colours

I know the colour rose, and it is lovely,
but not when it ripens in a tumour;
and healing greens, leaves and grass, so springlike,
in limbs that fester are not springlike.

I have seen red-blue tinged with hirsute mauve
in the plum-skin face of a suicide.
I have seen white, china white almost, stare
from behaind the smashed windscreen of a car.

And the criminal, multi-coloured flash
of an H-bomb is no more beautiful
than an autopsy when the belly’s opened -
to show cathedral windows never opened.

So in the simple blessing of a rainbow,
in the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror,
I have seen, visible, Death’s artifact
like a soldier’s ribbon on a tunic tacked.

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In the theatre

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:30:10 +0000

My eldest brother is a doctor – I was a schoolboy when he was a medical student and one day he came back from working in the operating theatre in Cardiff when he was a dresser to a well-known brain surgeon by the name of Lambert Rogers. He came back as I say and told us a very strange story, a haunting story, and years passed and it still haunted me and eventually I put down what he said in this poem. You ought to know that brain surgery is done under a local anaesthetic – it was so since the First World War, this for blood pressure reasons. The operation in question took place in 1938 when they didn’t have the scanning devices they now have which can pick out a lesion in the brain very cleverly, whereas in the past sometimes a surgeon, searching for the tumour or whatever it was, broke down more brain tissue than was necessary. ‘In the theatre’ – a true incident.

In the theatre

‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days – in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser – they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon crudely searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it…all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget…’

Sister saying – ‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking – ‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying – ‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’ -
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go – till the antique
gramaphone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow,’…leave…my…soul…alone…’
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

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Epithalamion

admin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:50:42 +0000

Epithalamion

Singing, today I married my white girl
beautiful in a barley field.
Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,
so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,
and send our love to the loveless world
of all the living and all the dead.

Now, no more than vulnerable human,
we, more than one, less than two,
are nearly ourselves in a barley field -
and only love is the rent that’s due
though the bailiffs of time return anew
to all the living but not the dead.

Shipwrecked, the sun sinks down harbours
of a sky, unloads its liquid cargoes
of marigolds, and I and my white girl
lie still in the barley – who else wishes
to speak, what more can be said
by all the living against all the dead?

Come then all you wedding guests:
green ghosts of trees, gold of barley,
you blackbird priests in the field,
you wind that shakes the pansy head
fluttering on a stalk like a butterfly;
come the living and come the dead.

Listen flowers, birds, winds, worlds,
tell all today that I married
more than a white girl in the barley -
for today I took to my human bed
flower and bird and wind and world,
and all the living and all the dead.

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