Somnolent, in the heat and rhythmic tick of the wall clock, it seems hours
before I am invited to cross the stream between waiting room
and Triage. The nurse commandeers a wastepaper basket as makeshift doorstop,
yet a wheelchair, pushed and hauled, barely makes it through.
Her assessment room has become a thoroughfare
as doctors and nurses swoop in and out, scooping up handfuls of papers,
opening and slamming shut drug cabinets.
Height? Weight? …. The Triage nurse disappears
into the adjoining control room, spot-lighted from a blue ceiling.
Doctors align x-rays, display on a screen, scrutinize the radiographer’s handiwork,
then bluster away to attend to multitudes. There are no islands of calm here,
just the fretwork of trolleys, patients folded into available spaces.
A woman on the other side of me engages. Here, twenty-four hours
she wears the forlorn look of a refugee set down on a foreign beach.
Ray Givans has been published in five pamphlet-length poetry collections, and one full collection with Dedalus Press. Ray was reared in Castlecaulfield, Co.Tyrone, but has lived in Belfast from the age of eighteen.