THE HOSPITAL AND COVID 19

Poems have been written about Covid 19 and poems have been written about the experience of a hospital stay, but has any poem been written yet about a hospital stay occasioned because of contracting Covid 19?
      I have written poems about my stays in hospital and finally, last Saturday, wrote a sixteen-liner called 'What the Angels Say' which is really about my experience of Covid 19 so far, a case of undergoing a fairly uneventful isolation.
      I have had two hospital stays in the past six years and I am considered 'high risk' for Covid 19, because of which I  continue to isolate to a good extent. But I am almost as afraid of going back to hospital as I am afraid of Covid 19.
      My admissions to hospital over the past six years were to a public hospital not far from where I live, which has recently earned the title of the worst in the country for overcrowding. In 2014, I was admitted there on account of complications arising from a triple bypass performed less than a week before, in a hospital in Dublin. The second admission to the hospital in question was shortly after a hip replacement, when I was diagnosed with Sepsis and spent the month of August 2017 receiving intravenous antibiotics four times a day (morning, noon, evening, night).
      I wrote a sonnet (as part of a longer sequence) about those two hospital experiences. It was sub-titled "with apologies to Patrick Kavanagh" because it references the latter's beautiful sonnet about recovering in hospital from lung cancer. It differs from the usual sonnet in that it was written (like Kavanagh's) in hexameters instead of pentameters. Also, my rhyming scheme is somewhat less regular than Kavanagh's.
      Kavanagh was more thankful than I was for his experience, even while he was in hospital; for the new lease of life he was given, leading to an artistic awakening. Today, I have become grateful for my new lease of life, but the thought of having to return to that hospital again fills me with dread.

THE HOSPITAL

(with apologies to Patrick Kavanagh)

A year ago I failed to love a dysfunctional 

ward in a public hospital: nurses overwrought, 

each task cut short by one more urgent, low morale,

not counting how the chap in the next bed roared all night

in vain for his wife and son, and every now and then

the overwhelming odour of incontinence. 

The main gate tempting me to a quick cigarette

when I had to be content in the smoke-free suntrap

beside the entrance door, the Sister’s allegations

that I falsely occupied an acute bed, the crammed  

and ever-changing maladies! This is not claptrap –

there’s far too much of it about, disguised as sense

in the mouths of government ministers who have named

my sorry hospital a ‘Centre of Excellence’.

      

In hospital (note tag on right arm) on the way to recovery, with my wife Margaret and unseen visitors, during Cuisle International Poetry Festival 2014

      

      I think that in Kavanagh's time, hospitals were scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, there wasn't the same danger of contracting a new disease during your stay. They had a more antiseptic feel to them.

      The conditions in my hospital were, as you may have gathered from my sonnet, not very satisfactory. The thought of having to go back there concentrates my mind, and makes me determined to wash my hands several times a day, avoid rubbing my nose, mouth and eyes. I touch coins only with a paper napkin in my hand, and perform a number of other practices, which may be uselful against Covid 19 or not. 
      It's amazing how itchy my eyes and nose have become since we were told to avoid contact with the face. Perhaps these organs were just as itchy before, but in those days touching them wasn't a matter of life or death!

©Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020

WHAT THE ANGELS SAY

WHAT THE ANGELS SAY

Here’s what the angels say. 

They look at me and say

He’s had a few scoops.

That’s what the angels say.

Will you look at him, they say,

with everything under padlocks,

and him drinking Burgundy

and playing his squeezebox.

And the state of the world

and the shortage of sanity  

and the dearth of angel dust!

And will ya look at him they say

heading off to Italy

in the middle of the Covid,

reciting into his mask,

thinking he's good as Ovid.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020

https://images.app.goo.gl/zUTHh1r1q97sRujB6

KISS (in The Irish Times 27 July)

ANATOMY OF THE COPPER MAN

ANATOMY OF THE COPPER MAN

(copperwork figure in a pub, Co Galway)

The entry wound is under the right elbow - here.

And as you can see

the neck of the fiddle has struck the heart. In fact

almost the whole fiddle has entered the body.

Only the head and feet remain intact.

Each arm, each leg, is fifteen fragments;

the trunk an archipelago, a jigsaw

presided over by the moonstruck face.

A relic of geansaí adheres to the neck;

lapels of a vanished coat. A straw hat

crowns this extraordinary apparition.

It fidgets forward in fine copper boots,

its own backbone for walking stick.

A king of shreds and patches, gentlemen,

held together by no thread of consequence.

Note how the fixed grin belies

the fact that the night sky floats through the wounds.

geansaí is the word for a pullover in Irish.

A POEM WITH RINSE-AID IN IT

The story goes that at the launch of the first issue of Poetry Ireland Magazine, back in the early ‘60s, the young Michael Hartnett criticized Patrick Kavanagh for using the word garage in a poem, and Kavanagh became very angry, upending a table of drinks. What would Michael have thought of a poem with the word Rinse-Aid in it?

A POEM WITH RINSE-AID IN IT

(Hartnett vs Kavanagh,1962)

Once, there was a table of drinks upset

in Bailey’s Pub in Dublin over the use 

of garage in a poem. It’s not the kind 

of word that should be used in poems, said 

young Hartnett to his senior, whereupon

Kavanagh hefted a literary round.

Note that I used the past tense of the verb

heft just then. It’s a word which gained prestige

from Seamus Heaney’s frequent use of it, 

a word that would grace any poem, and does 

many, by Heany-echoing poets, since.

There are other Heaney-words that start with H –

hunker for example, and hoke – they, too,

are replicated for poetic kudos. 

I wonder what would Michael Hartnett think,

God rest his soul, seeing the word Rinse-Aid

in a poem? How many bottles of Rinse-Aid

would fit in that County Monaghan garage?

Could all the Rinse-Aid in the country rinse

the garage out of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem?

I hunker when I’ve filled the dishwasher

and hoke about in the space under the sink

groping at bottles, looking for Rinse-Aid.

© CIARAN O'DRISCOLL 2019

DUBLIN LAUNCH OF SURVISION TITLES

INVITATION FOR SATURDAY

ANATOLY KUDRYAVITSKY WRITES:

Following the successful launch of two of our Irish titles in Limerick last month, we are pleased to announce our first event in Dublin: a launch of all the chapbooks and full collections that SurVision Books have published so far.

THE LAUNCH AND READING WILL TAKE PLACE ON SATURDAY 12th JANUARY at 2PM (14.00) in PEARSE STREET LIBRARY, 144 PEARSE STREET, DUBLIN 2.

The readings will be from the following chapbooks and poets:
THE SPEAKING TREES by Ciaran O'Driscoll (Ireland)
CONVERSATION STARTERS IN A LANGUAGE NO ONE SPEAKS by Bob Lucky (USA).
CAMERAMOUTH by Elin O'Hara Slavick(USA)
CHRONOS DINES ALONE by Anton Yakovlev (USA)
STOWAWAY by Anatoly Kudryavitsky (Ireland)

All eleven Titles (Poetry Chapbooks and Full Collections) published so far by SurVision Books will be on sale at the Event, at special prices.

WHOTSYT (We Hope To See You There!)

NOVEMBER AND THE SPLEENWORT PLANT

SPLEENWORT

I have often observed the Spleenwort plant, pictured above, on my I boundary wall. It looked wretched and rustily withering all through summer and autumn. It's only in the last few weeks it has grown fresh fronds. This is a plant that seems to come into its own in the heart of winter.

Spleenwort is apparently so called because it was formerly thought to be useful in curing or easing disorders of the spleen. In November, many people tend to be more splenetic than usual, having had their good weather taken away from them, like candy from a kid, while the nostalgia of Christmas and its culinary comforts have not yet established themselves, despite the flooding of TV screens with Yuletide images.

This week's storm heralded the arrival of the dúluachair (winter weather). Were it not for the promise of Christmas feasts and holidays, Diana would have put anyone off his game (no pun intended). 

But January tends to be more trying than November, in my experience, because of the fact that there's very little to look forward to, for a long stretch, once the celebrations are over and the Christmas tree consigned to the Corporation for mulching.

My poem, 'November Days', was published in Cyphers No 85, which came out in the late spring of this year, so I thought I might give it a more weather-appropriate airing here in my blog, after the first storm of the winter. 

Hopefully, we will soon be distracted from the dúluachair by the lúcháir (joy) of Christmas. 

NOVEMBER DAYS

Parsley pales. The cat craps in the flower box.

Round the garden table, garden chairs still range,

an icebound working group on climate change.

The car door’s frozen door-handle unlocks

when blessed with water. Christmas rules TV.

Although no visitor’s appeared in weeks,

the feeble latch-grip slips, the front gate creaks

its winter wolf-crying expectancy. 

Our neighbour takes his DIY indoors,

no longer deafens us with power tools.

Spleenwort fronds survive on old stone walls,

each finger-lobe a blister-strip of spores.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll, 2018