Poem by Harry Clifton

Doctor Benn

(Gottfried Benn, 1886–1956)

Practitioners in poor neighbourhoods
Everywhere, in the aftermaths of wars
And reputations, Doctor Benn,
Physician and poet, soldier and survivor,
Is open for consultation.

It is not you, he says, who are sick.
It is the age, inside you,
That is sick. Your waiting rooms
And patients, grains of insulin, morphine,
Are all beside the point.

Professional ethics bore you.
You would love him, just once, to talk about Poetry.
He smiles politely,
Changes the subject. ‘That garden’,
He says, ‘You see it? On the plot of wasteland

Between ruins, its smoke-drift of autumn,
Compost fires, potato drills in leaf –
The woman who tends it, far gone in years,
Her gabardine belted with old rope,
Her headscarf, veteran’s scars,
Is everything to me . . .’

Sometimes he helps her, smoking a cigar.
No one reads him now, of course.
He would sleep, he says, through whole bombardments,
Believing in nothing any more –
Untouchable, pure.

Harry Clifton (2005)

There is something of the Wasteland about it, isn't there?  He gives us a quiet story from the other side of the mirror, where there are no trivial events, but only the slow-moving essentials, taking whole lifetimes before they choose their direction.