WEBVTT

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When I was a young
girl in England,

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the Second World War was on.

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And they had a draft
for women in England.

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And I didn't want to be drafted.

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And I became a nurse, which
was a reserved occupation.

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And after about a year in a sort
of wartime, civilian nursing

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organization, I decided that
I kind of liked nursing.

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And I went to nursing school.

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I dropped out of
that after a year

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because I couldn't stay
in one place long enough.

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I couldn't see staying there
for another three years.

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But I did go on working as a
nurse for a number of years.

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Well, let me see, a couple
of years after that anyway

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and then sporadically
after that.

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In England, one could
work as an assistant nurse

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if one had had some training
and some experience.

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It's a category of nurse, which
doesn't exist in this country.

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And so I had a good
deal of experience

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of nursing and of hospitals.

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And I never wrote
anything about it

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except one poem, which
was in a book called--

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which I don't have with
me, a long ago poem.

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It was in a book called With
Eyes at the Back of Our Heads.

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And it was called "The Dead."

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And it was based on
my nursing experience

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and on laying out
the body of the dead.

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But, otherwise, I
really never touched

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on that whole experience.

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Because, when I was
living it, I was too--

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I wasn't capable,
technically or emotionally,

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of dealing with it in my poems.

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And the poems I
was writing really

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don't give a clue to
what I was living.

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They were typical adolescent
poems of vague emotion.

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And my first book,
which they have--

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well, they have my first book
over at the Poetry Center here.

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It's called The Double Image.

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And if you have the curiosity
to glance through that book,

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you'll see that there's
hardly a clue to the fact

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that there was a war on, that
England was getting bombed,

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and that I was living
in the midst of all that

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and working as a nurse.

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You just wouldn't know it.

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By the time I felt capable as
a somewhat more mature person

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and a more experienced poet of
dealing with that experience,

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the experience had faded.

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And I felt it was
too remote from me.

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But a year, two years
ago, I suppose it was,

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around two years ago, I saw
the movie Sunday Bloody Sunday.

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And there's a shot in that movie
which was very vivid to me.

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It's just a brief
shot where the doctor

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goes to the hospital at night.

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And it invoked,
for me, so sharply,

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my experience of
those nursing years

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that it enabled me to write one
poem at least about that time

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of my life.

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And that's this one called
"The Malice of Innocence."

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It has a couple of
French words in it,

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which are from a Rimbaud poem.

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Maybe I'll remember
to sort of mention

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those things afterwards.

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I've taken to putting notes
in the back of my books.

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Years ago, I used
not to put notes

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because I thought it
would be pretentious.

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And now I've decided it would
be pretentious not to put notes.

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So I don't know
if that says more

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about me or about
our times, I'm sure.

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But anyway.

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The poem is called "The
Malice of Innocence."

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"A glimpsed world
halfway through the film,

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one slow shot of a
ward at night holds me

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when the rest is
quickly losing illusion.

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Strange hold, as of
romance of glamour.

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Not because, even
when I lived in it,

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I had illusions
about that world.

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Simply because I did live there.

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And it was a world.

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Green shaded lamp glowing
on the charge desk.

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Clipboards stacked on
the desk for the night.

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Sighs and waiting, waiting
for morning stirrings,

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in the dim, long room,
warm, orderly, and full

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of breathings as a cow barn.

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Death and pain
dominate this world.

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For though many are cured,
they leave still weak,

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still tremulous, still
knowing mortality

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has whispered to them.

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Have seen in the folding
of white bedspreads

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according to rule the
starched pleats of a shroud.

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It's against that
frozen counterpane

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and the knowledge too how black
an old mouth gaping at death

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can look, that the
night routine has,

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in itself, without
illusions, glamour perhaps.

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It had a rhythm, a
choreographic decorum

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when all the evening
chores had been done

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and a multiple restless quiet
listened to the wall clock's

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pulse.

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And turn by turn, the two of us
made our rounds on tiptoe, bed

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to bed, counting by flashlight
how many pairs of open eyes

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were turned to us, noting
all we were trained to note.

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We were gravely
dancing, starched

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in our caps, our
trained replies,

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our whispering aprons,
the well-rehearsed pavanne

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of power.

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Yes, wasn't it power
and not compassion

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gave our young hearts
their hard fervor?

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I hated to scrub out
lockers, to hand out

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trays of unappetizing food.

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And by day, or the
tail-end of night,

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daybreak dull on gray
faces, ours and theirs,

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the anxious hurry, the
scolding old-maid bosses.

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But I loved the power
of our ordered nights.

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Gleaming surfaces I'd helped
to polish making patterns

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in the shipshape half dark.

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Loved the knowing what to do
and doing it, lists of tasks

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getting shorter hour by
hour, and knowing all the

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while that emergency might ring
with a case to admit anytime,

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if a bed were empty.

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Poised, ready for that.

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The camera never returned
to the hospital ward.

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The story moved on
into the streets,

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into the rooms
where people lived.

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But I got lost in
the death rooms

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a while, remembering
being crudely,

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cruelly, just as a soldier or
one of the guards from Dachau

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might be, in love with order.

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An angel, like the
chercheuses de poux,

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floating noiseless
from bed to bed,

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smoothing pillows, tipping
water to parched lips,

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writing details
of agony carefully

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into the night report."

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[APPLAUSE]

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