Belleview Hospital Lobby
I saw a dying man today
on a rolling bed,
a gurney, I think is what it’s called.
He lay perfectly still,
his eyes closed without
any motion in the lids,
while we walked past him
to go to lunch.
It occurred to me
that he probably didn’t even
realize he was lying
in the middle of the lobby.
Perhaps he was dreaming
of when he was young and rode
the A train to Harlem to hear jazz,
Or when he met his wife
in Washington Square Park
forty-three years before her cancer.
I look back toward him;
all I see are the soles of his feet
under a white blanket,
and I hope that he
will not be me
in a few decades when
I miss these days of my youth.
About this poem
I wrote this poem a while ago because I was disturbed by something I saw in the lobby of a NYC hospital.
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Submitted by DXFerat on May 10, 2023
- 45 sec read
- 57 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XXX XXX AXB XCB CXX XXX AXX BBX X |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 648 |
Words | 150 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1 |
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"Belleview Hospital Lobby" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/160926/belleview-hospital-lobby>.
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