The sickbay

Published on by Laura Bloomsbury 
I'm sick. There's a pain
with no name emptying
to emptiness. The unspeakable
at fever pitch sustains
a vastness to the Void.
Black holes suck in
fielding their magnetic pull
and streams of lexeme trails
diarrhoeic.

And somewhere there are sickrooms
with sickbeds and bucket
but I lie quiet in this sickbay
the smell of ozone
on my breath 
where the surf breathes
in and out, always shifting
sifting sounds of shingle
I mistook for angel wings
  • lexeme: a basic abstract unit of meaning; a head word and its inflections

For Bjorn’s Open Link Night @dVerse where anything goes as long as it’s poetry though I was almost tempted by his optional mini prompt from one of Neruda’s questions

35 thoughts on “The sickbay”

  2. That’s one of the few things I fear, Laura, ‘a pain with no name emptying to emptiness’ in a quiet sickbay with ‘the smell of ozone on my breath’. The sounds in these lines are so effective:

    ‘where the surf breathes
    in and out, always shifting
    sifting sounds of shingle
    I mistook for angel wings’.

  3. This is incredibly poignant, Laura! I resonate with the image of “always shifting sifting sounds of shingle I mistook for angel wings.” 💜💜

  4. Well Laura, you made me look up “lexemes”. Fascinating word and image. The repetition of “sick” is very effective, I guess that’s the lexeme? More than a few of friends are experiencing what you describe in this poem. Great writing. JIM

    1. thank you, Jim, for going that one step further and looking/linking up lexeme to the repetitions though there is poetic licence rather than grammatical accuracy too 😉

  5. I felt pain and sadness within the poem itself. I pictured someone being really ill and experiencing others around feeling sick and ache. But, one most suffer in silence in experiencing such pain. I hope I understood the poem. My interpretation of your work.

    1. thank you for your interpretive feedback which made me think – in the poem I see the black hole isolation of ennui which the 2nd verse begins to heal with the whole notion of the bay, the ozone and the breath. There is realisation in the final line that the death wish was just a fantasy

  6. Laura, I love these last lines:

    where the surf breathesin and out, always shiftingsifting sounds of shingleI mistook for angel wings

  8. I felt right there with you. You nailed the feeling of sickness.

  9. This feels like a sharp hit of pain at first, an unbearable kind that takes over and then that quiet time, when you breathe and wonder about angel’s wings. Wonderfully written poem.

  10. Laura, I like the turn from the hellish first stanza to that moment of calm which resting in sickness can sometimes provide…

  11. You’ve brought the sickroom into our rooms through scent and sound. A room most of us, sadly, are familiar with. Love your last line! Well done.

  13. I’m interpreting this as a sickness of the soul–perhaps depression–and finding solace in the sea. I like the sounds in the poem and the repetition.

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