The Hospital
Frantic activity is visible at the hospital everyday
Mt Pleasant cemetery overlooks the chaotic frenzy
Buses, taxis, cars - all vying for a resting spot
Ambulance sirens arrive to halt the motorized madness
Inside, visitors indulge in coffee and donuts
Hybrids of wheel-chaired patients sit in frustrating idleness
Medical personnel scurry to and fro
Elevators fill and empty the day's attendees
Birthing mothers are oblivious to the ubiquitous madness
Their infants lazing in queued plastic dorms
Unshaven fathers filled with zeal and anxious fear
Waiting room families offer christening names
The palliative ward offers only sadness
Young and old riddled by disease await their death
Clergy equipped with bibles recite the last rites
Families sit silent, overtaken by an eerie exhaustion
Neurology offers a place for the living dead to reside
Stroke victims rendered motionless
Their brain departed from our plane
Their bodies entrusted to the helping hands of strangers
Oncology greets those afflicted with the eternal cell
Radiation summoned to help their crippled bodies
Chemotherapy requisitioned to drip away the dread
The surgeon’s knife in the end cuts away what remains
The hospital differs not from the family farm
Where unwary animals eventually greet the slaughterhouse
Where life and death are greeted with each new season
Where the tilled soil is not unlike a shallow grave
Thank you,
Joseph Pede
Joseph Pede
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