Poetry Promenade

Anna Saunders, Robin Gilbert, Marilyn Timms,
 Annie Ellis, Howard Timms and myself

A very pleasant afternoon on Thursday; as part of the cultural exchange between Cheltenham Poetry Festival and the Winchcombe Festival of Music and Arts, a group of us from Cheltenham took part in a "Poetry Promenade" at the Methodist Church in Winchcombe, each of us reading poems inspired by the town and the beautiful scenic area that surrounds it. We were made extremely welcome and thoroughly enjoyed our visit.

One of my own contributions was inspired by Winchcombe Hospital, a much loved local facility that closed in 2008. Like so many other small units around the country,  it was a casualty of centralisation of resources and (in my view, having spent my whole working life in health care) the misguided belief that bigger is always better.

Cottage Hospital

Listen. Between neat maisonettes with close cropped lawns

the ghosts of birth and death hover in the midnight air;

a hoarse, consumptive cough, a fretful, febrile cry

vie on the wind with carbolic stench

by the hawthorn hedge and memorial bench where 

pyjama'd patients smoked and tea leaves fed the roses.

Harsh street lights mirror the shaded lamps where nurses,

capped and cloaked, wrote notes, sipped Horlicks,

stifled yawns and watched till dawn their charges

blanketed against the chill in balcony beds

between Sister's torchlit rounds, her footsteps 

grating gravel in the shadowy grounds.

But few now recall this previous incarnation;

only the wide-eyed cat, silently stalking suburbia's streets,

scaling a wicker fence, perceives with some sixth sense

a rustle of starch and the absent beat of a long-still heart.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2013)