Tool-kit
Just before the end,
the ward sister told us
how the nursing auxiliary
found her sitting up one day,
using the pointed end
of a metal nail-file, trying
to adjust a little spring-valve
that controlled the rate of dosage
from the morphine-drip:
file from the same manicure set
returned to us in official plastic,
same manicure set we had saved for
and wrapped forty years earlier:
zipped white leather
with a gaping red interior.
*Beverly Ellis set out to be a novelist, but was waylaid by poetry and is currently half-way through an MA in the subject. Her work explores the disputed borderlines of society and the other-worlds of the paranormal.
This is an excellent poem. The simplicity of the language made even simpler by the lack of the definite article in places where one might be expected, and the restraint of the adjectives shows real craft. Although it does do a fair bit of 'telling' the fact that it is a reported account allows the poet to get away with that. The quiet desperation of the patient is so well realised and I love the wonderfully surgical image of the last two lines *envious*!