There is a man I almost know,
an orderly in green scrubs I see
in the elevator, pass in the halls
at the hospital where we are careful
to look down, knowing our patients
deserve their privacy, and we are strangers.
Elevators are full of strangers.
They see without even looking and know
more than you'd think about the patients
on gurneys. The door opens. I look to see
who's getting off, and it's him, being careful
with his gurney as it takes the bump into halls
where everyone is in a hurry, uneven halls
clumsily connected, painted by strangers
in colors that sicken. Always, he is careful
with the bumps, I've been behind him, know
the set of his shoulders, his grey pony tail. I see
some others who transport patients
with tumors or wounds or dementia, patients
who are helpless, but leave them in the halls
alone while they hurry off on break to see
if the coffee's ready yet. Professional strangers,
we avert our eyes because we know
too much about the system's failures. Careful
about privacy means we protect our own, careful
to forget that sometimes we are the patients.
We all take a turn being human, should know
better than to walk along these halls
as if we shared nothing with the strangers
we take care of, like the ones I'm here to see
today, who carry code words I never like to see:
metastatic, bipolar, morbidly obese. ‘Careful,’
what's implied. Extraordinary strangers
often, for I have much in common with my patients,
whose bedsides can remind me of familial halls
that bore the exact same misery. Good thing I know
enough as I start to chart on patients
who would all rather be cured than healed, to be careful
not to write about everything I know.
Kathleen M. Kelley is a social worker. The poem was selected by Femi Oyebode.
Published in The Hippocrates Prize Anthology, Hippocrates Press, 2012.
© Kathleen M. Kelley. Reprinted with permission.
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