Hospital Music
From our UK edition
In the square at St Bartholomew’s hospital,Crates of flowers are stacked for bedding outRound the plane trees. Patients with paper cups sit aboutIn wheelchairs or under the shelters. Above, in the hall,An orchestra is rehearsing: a Mozart piano concerto,The Bach double, some Handel — clearly audible outsideThrough the fountain’s splash, as if filling a tideOr a sound the wind makes. Nobody seems to knowIt is there. A youth with a reconstructed faceGlares at a girl, grey-lidded, lip-white, drip-fedWho stares at a scabbed tree permanently disfigured,While nurses, a doctor, go by at a determined pace.Either the sound is of all things the most naturalOr there is no connction of any kind, none at all.