As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning …
The ward is a war-zone, a battlefield
where daily dies our confidence,
our grounds for hope, our energy.
Each start of shift, we rise to face
an enemy whose strength exceeds
our fearful expectations.
Poorly equipped, still we advance,
driven by our integrity,
while, on all sides, the dying plunge
downward through a corrupted sea,
their last breaths greenly frothing out
from choked throats as they spiral down.
Our masters moralise and watch,
hand-wringing as the casualties
increase in numbers day by day.
Spruce Generals, they spend hours with charts
while we must soldier on each day.
To those who fill the wards, the sick,
for whom there is scant hope, we fight,
but these are not good deaths, instead
men thrash in panic towards the end
as a green sea invades their lungs.
We do our utmost, still they die,
the old, the hardly old, the young.
Through night-shift trenches, barbed-wire days,
we grimly trudge, barely awake,
round-shouldered, prematurely old,
towards our shift-end scrubbing-down,
a brief respite and restless rest.
The virus takes no prisoners
and those it spares are subtly changed:
their swagger gone, they rise each day
aware of their fragility
while, night and morning, we return,
dog-tired, to grapple with our fear
because there are no conscripts here.
Richard Fleming
