Caws, Nurses And Muses Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Yesterday we sort of rescued an old man
Who had crossed The Parade at Wakefield Park
Stumbled and cracked his head so hard on the pavement
That the paramedic could see his skull –
He didn’t bleed much – the old man that is –
And immediately upped and set off for home
Almost horizontal from the shoulders
Like one of the Anthropophagi
Homing on sheer instinct back to Dee Street
Face covered in rivulets of blood
Followed by my wife who is a nurse
And a kind young woman from the Ministry of Social Development
And me turning with the boys in the car until we lost them
Only to catch up with them outside the old man’s town house
Eventually, so that we were able to drive off and bring back
The ambulance when it got lost.
It seems that he is an 87 year old engineer
Whose wife is in care as she has dementia
And that he walks up to see her every day -
Desperately trying to push away attention
And the possibility of any kind of care for himself
That might rob him of his independence.

And the night before I had been to the theatre
And seen a one-woman show about Sylvia Plath
So that I have spent a day or so reading around
Sylvia, Assia, Olwyn, Carol, Frieda, Nicholas, Shura and Ted
About dreadful behaviour like Sylvia mocking her sister-in-law
Olwyn as a Barren Woman -‘blank-faced and mum as a nurse’ -
And killing herself the day before a home-help was due to start
And Assia sending Sylvia’s friend the gas bill and then sleeping in Sylvia’s bed
And making sure that the childcare au pair had a day off before
She gassed herself and four-year old Shura
Felo-de-sey - auto-da-fey – hey ho.

And Hughes, a hard, brilliant, canny apeth, who saw himself as a bold
Emotionally charged Satyr drawing blood with ravaged captive nymphs
To whom he gave orders about getting up in the morning
And not going back to bed for a snooze in the afternoon
And making sure that his house was kept in order with his shirts ironed
But who was perhaps as much like a carrion crow caught
Raking at the maggots and rotting meat and pelts of field voles
And picking the eyes out of frost struck lambs.

Assia gave instructions that her body should lie in a quiet English churchyard
But Ted put her ashes up the crematorium chimney
Knowing she was Jewish and that her family had fled Germany -
And he gave Olwyn the job of running the Plath literary estate.
Somewhat ironic then that he spent his last 22 years
With Carol who was a nurse and that the only survivor
Of the original cast – Frieda - makes a thing of looking after sick crows.

‘An honour! were not I thine only nurse,
I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat’.

‘A man, young lady! Lady - such a man
As all the world - why, he's a man of wax’.

‘O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!
Most lamentable day, most woeful day...’

‘Honest good fellows, ah, put up, put up;
For, well you know, this is a pitiful case’.