Sunday, January 14, 2007

Friday Night at the ER
By Don Iannone

The hospital emergency room is filled
with long sick faces most nights.
It's Friday night, and
things are much worse than normal,
as a steady stream of e-squad vehicles
pull up and drop off sick and injured people.
You wonder how some people are still alive
after such horrible things happen to them.
A young girl is brought in
with the top of a pop bottle embedded
in her blood-drenched right eye.
Down the long corridor,
desperate unanswered cries echo
long after two men's bodies are hauled off
on cold black gurneys,
draped with stiff white sheets.
I listen in as a trembling elderly woman
with matted white hair
begs the trauma nurse to promise
someone will feed her cats,
who sit faithfully on the front window sill
until they are noticed and let into the house.
As I ready to leave,
a medical team rushes past me.
It's a major trauma patient...
a gunshot wound in the abdomen.
It's bad.
I partially turn away as the team wheels
a lifeless ashen-faced young Black boy
through the side entrance door.
His bright red blood is puddled
atop the piled sheets covering his thin frame.
As I walk limply to the car,
the cold January night air grabs me like death.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a poet, I very much enjoyed my walk through your blog...as an avid reader, I think I enjoyed it even more. I'll link you, if I may.

Borut said...

So real and yet so nightmarish. I hope all is okay!

Pat Paulk said...

Hard reality most of us don't see. Of course the questions pops up, why were you in the emergency room?

Anonymous said...

In the midst of it all, your compassion...

Anonymous said...

In the midst of it all, your compassion...

Don Iannone, D.Div., Ph.D. said...

Thanks all for your comments and questions.

Hammer and Tong, I shall link you as well. Enjoyed my visit to your eye-opening blog filled with magical words and images.

Pat, Don't you visit the ER once a week for inspiration? Just kidding. It is a side of life we'd rather not see, but some times we do.

Thanks Dan...like jello, always room for compassion.

Borut...all systems are go! Thanks.

floots said...

very powerful piece
and that last line was stunning

Don Iannone, D.Div., Ph.D. said...

Thanks Floots. I think we all need a good close. I only wished that some of those in the ER had had a better one for their lives...

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