Suffering Heard.
(Night in  Radcliffe  Hospital.)

            Island of Radcliffe set
In the Plain of Oxfordshire,
            Lying in the mist of night
            Upon a seeming calm.     
            In the Middle Watch
            A stentorian continuous cry,
            Hollow with age, deep and bass.
            A Captain-- lies lost on his last voyage.
            Insane with pain,
            Floating--”Not Under Command!”
            Trapped in the cabin of extremity.
            Other vessels nearby- four-masted inverts
            Below the surface of
            The medical Stand of Tide
            For all -- but keeping a listening Watch
            As the bass cries reverberate
            With a now tolling bell
            That of heaven or of hell?
          Rich, from resonant
            Oxygen Cylinder, (air of life.)
            The toll, not marking
            The passing Eighth of Watch
            But the merged crying
            Against an earthly Hell!
            No! he  cries not the Soundings
            Nor for the others
            Of the God detail-ed Watch,
            (Though they hear,)
            He calls, indeed he calls and strikes his bell,
 Taking Soundings
            Of all those he has ever known
            Or Loved --in vain,
            To alternate,
            With pitiful begging  for the next
            Poniard of Morphine        
            As the cylinder, his great fog bell
            Is taken -- and wheeled away.
            I did not see nor hear his vessel stern-lift
            To take the final plunge,
            Nor know the throb
            Of his heart’s propellers’s
            Last impotents beats
            Upon the waters of Life.

            Jack Lacey.(C) 21st May ,1998. D7