hospital poem

someone is always taking up where someone else ended. It is
‘in the nature of the beast’: someone walks down the wrong
supermarket aisle, someone has left the dishes soaking,
and here these busy shapes silhouette through curtains,

a siren resolves into speech at a rapid staccato
but when the response comes, the voice is kind

in the Tenebrae of the hall after hours, someone
still stops to buy almonds, and continues
their pilgrimage to the wrong room

and someone answers a question that no-one is asking,
that no-one has been asking for a very long time