When I was a young girl in England,
the Second World War was on.
And they had a draft for women in England.
And I didn't want to be drafted.
And I became a nurse, which was a reserved occupation.
And after about a year in a sort of wartime, civilian nursing
organization, I decided that I kind of liked nursing.
And I went to nursing school.
I dropped out of that after a year
because I couldn't stay in one place long enough.
I couldn't see staying there for another three years.
But I did go on working as a nurse for a number of years.
Well, let me see, a couple of years after that anyway
and then sporadically after that.
In England, one could work as an assistant nurse
if one had had some training and some experience.
It's a category of nurse, which doesn't exist in this country.
And so I had a good deal of experience
of nursing and of hospitals.
And I never wrote anything about it
except one poem, which was in a book called--
which I don't have with me, a long ago poem.
It was in a book called With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads.
And it was called "The Dead."
And it was based on my nursing experience
and on laying out the body of the dead.
But, otherwise, I really never touched
on that whole experience.
Because, when I was living it, I was too--
I wasn't capable, technically or emotionally,
of dealing with it in my poems.
And the poems I was writing really
don't give a clue to what I was living.
They were typical adolescent poems of vague emotion.
And my first book, which they have--
well, they have my first book over at the Poetry Center here.
It's called The Double Image.
And if you have the curiosity to glance through that book,
you'll see that there's hardly a clue to the fact
that there was a war on, that England was getting bombed,
and that I was living in the midst of all that
and working as a nurse.
You just wouldn't know it.
By the time I felt capable as a somewhat more mature person
and a more experienced poet of dealing with that experience,
the experience had faded.
And I felt it was too remote from me.
But a year, two years ago, I suppose it was,
around two years ago, I saw the movie Sunday Bloody Sunday.
And there's a shot in that movie which was very vivid to me.
It's just a brief shot where the doctor
goes to the hospital at night.
And it invoked, for me, so sharply,
my experience of those nursing years
that it enabled me to write one poem at least about that time
of my life.
And that's this one called "The Malice of Innocence."
It has a couple of French words in it,
which are from a Rimbaud poem.
Maybe I'll remember to sort of mention
those things afterwards.
I've taken to putting notes in the back of my books.
Years ago, I used not to put notes
because I thought it would be pretentious.
And now I've decided it would be pretentious not to put notes.
So I don't know if that says more
about me or about our times, I'm sure.
But anyway.
The poem is called "The Malice of Innocence."
"A glimpsed world halfway through the film,
one slow shot of a ward at night holds me
when the rest is quickly losing illusion.
Strange hold, as of romance of glamour.
Not because, even when I lived in it,
I had illusions about that world.
Simply because I did live there.
And it was a world.
Green shaded lamp glowing on the charge desk.
Clipboards stacked on the desk for the night.
Sighs and waiting, waiting for morning stirrings,
in the dim, long room, warm, orderly, and full
of breathings as a cow barn.
Death and pain dominate this world.
For though many are cured, they leave still weak,
still tremulous, still knowing mortality
has whispered to them.
Have seen in the folding of white bedspreads
according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.
It's against that frozen counterpane
and the knowledge too how black an old mouth gaping at death
can look, that the night routine has,
in itself, without illusions, glamour perhaps.
It had a rhythm, a choreographic decorum
when all the evening chores had been done
and a multiple restless quiet listened to the wall clock's
pulse.
And turn by turn, the two of us made our rounds on tiptoe, bed
to bed, counting by flashlight how many pairs of open eyes
were turned to us, noting all we were trained to note.
We were gravely dancing, starched
in our caps, our trained replies,
our whispering aprons, the well-rehearsed pavanne
of power.
Yes, wasn't it power and not compassion
gave our young hearts their hard fervor?
I hated to scrub out lockers, to hand out
trays of unappetizing food.
And by day, or the tail-end of night,
daybreak dull on gray faces, ours and theirs,
the anxious hurry, the scolding old-maid bosses.
But I loved the power of our ordered nights.
Gleaming surfaces I'd helped to polish making patterns
in the shipshape half dark.
Loved the knowing what to do and doing it, lists of tasks
getting shorter hour by hour, and knowing all the
while that emergency might ring with a case to admit anytime,
if a bed were empty.
Poised, ready for that.
The camera never returned to the hospital ward.
The story moved on into the streets,
into the rooms where people lived.
But I got lost in the death rooms
a while, remembering being crudely,
cruelly, just as a soldier or one of the guards from Dachau
might be, in love with order.
An angel, like the chercheuses de poux,
floating noiseless from bed to bed,
smoothing pillows, tipping water to parched lips,
writing details of agony carefully
into the night report."
[APPLAUSE]