Tragedy with a Smile

[Delta40]

Hospital waiting rooms suck.
Phones ringing off the hook,
coughing, choking, sneezing
European and Asian chatter.
Any weird germ could come my way.
I try to rise above it all
so I can hear the news on a monitor
metres from my chair.
Another disaster. Isn't that life?
Flooding of the East coast
Drought in the South
Bushfires in the West.
People are missing and nobody
knows what to do.
'Buy a Lotto ticket' says a
fat beer belly bloke next to me.
I laugh and wonder about insurance.
The death count goes up
while morbid families
drive to the disaster
to film their kids swimming.
The posters on the wall
are never quite near enough to read
and make me squint like I need
to go to the toilet.
Will You Recognize a Heart Attack?
I could die with a wrist slap from God
for not reading those danger signs.
Where I sit, I'm just too far away.
The news reader smiles at us all
reading torn, worn outdated magazines.
Her chirpy 'good morning Australia' voice
belies the tragic events being aired.
'Don't worry folks, it will get much worse
before it gets better'
I accept that I will witness more loss
Mother Nature can take it all up a
click or two.
I hope it doesn't take too long
for the doctor to call my name.

[DieterM]

The poem seems astoundingly calm for someone sitting in a hospital waiting room – is it resignation I detect? I've been sitting in hospital waiting rooms so often that I know perfectly well how you can feel: anxious, nervous, wanting to cry out loud because they make you wait for so long, wanting to slap someone because you still don't know what's wrong with you or with the person you have brought there. Yet there's a certain appeal to your poem, a kind of detachment, estrangement that I particularly like. It reminds me faintly of the atmosphere in Camus' 'L'étranger', you know, that main character who is so strangely far away from everything he witnesses, everything he does, everything he goes through, with that first sentence that says it all, 'Yesterday, my mother has died. Or the day before yesterday. I don't remember.'

[hillwalker]

I got the contrast between personal crisis (the writer's situation) and national crisis (as aired on tv) and how containing the two can be just too much at times.

It was a little prosey and jumpy at the start but you did a great job of distilling that mode of surrender or detachment one adopts once one is in the hands of the 'white coats'.

H

[farnoosh]

I LOVED it,can I cope it on my facebook page with your name on it???

[PrinceMyshkin]

I thought that


I could die with a wrist slap from God
for not reading those danger signs.

was the high-light if this poem can be said to have a high-light! I thought Dieter had some very interesting insights into it.

[Haunted]

Images of the current flooding in Australia came to mind. A great parallel, the homeland as the macrocosm of a body with an illness. Many great lines here, as Prince pointed out. Hospitals are overwhelming and you delivered the picture so expertly. At least you didn't have to wear one of those hospital gowns, though I was wondering what the Aussie style is like.

[Delta40]

Thank you all. I work for the commonwealth government and four of the offices have been closed so I imagine it will be bedlam at work today.

[qimissung]

One does get detached because you have to wait so long, always. I like the juxtaposition of the narrator's detachment and the chaos all around her.

[Jerrybaldy]

Nearly a short story Delta but ultimately a story of the Deltaesque inner voice we all love to read.
Jerry