The View from Maggie’s

Mairi Murphy

The View from Maggie’s

Inside outside pain,
a thin-lipped fragile sadness,
cradled in the architecture of hope,
who would want to be here?
Larches push understanding from the soil,
a prescription from conception to grave I don’t ask for.
Who wants this level of sympathy?
Cervix on a dish, ripe for dissection,
subsection of uterus, a rudderless crotch:
to what do I give birth?
Commodified to sculpted womanhood, do I fit?
Hips emboldened with hormones,
are we more than the sum of our parts?
Living beyond pain my ovaries have earned enough.
Beyond the white van nightmares hook-up for motherless foals, what fools!
From the funny farm plugged or drugged hermaphrodites flood our seas.
What breaks through – what lies beyond the intense gaze, bending down beside me?
An overflow of caring – what level of madness is this?
Give me coldness, detachment, cart me away
lock me up, unfit for society.
Empathizing with hysteria
ignoring the un-listened to –
leaving me with what I can’t,
healing, in the absence of kindness.

Royal

Big thick walls that sooked away her life: she breathes it through and through
as though fixed to receive, incapable of filtering a conversation with herself.

Long hours and taken for granted-I don’t know how she did it.
She sat silent in staffrooms with a pecking order

everything was placed ready to be used everything was half said

there’s nothing in your streets except stories, waiting to be bought and sold.

Reticence scares me perfect. Tell it like it is.

Radiation ricochet, off walls and into gonads.

tell it like it is….

blame me, then. I’m not bitter, neither is she.

she breathes it through and through
anger so isolating it will snap stratospheres
crack the earth, split the ground we walk on, till we don’t walk at all.

Till we don’t talk at all.

Ventriloquist

my puppet shows
feelings I express
through gritted teeth
remaining impassive
that’s my trick!

I can throw anger
make you catch faces
mirror my feelings
blame you for that expression
unreadable, I’m numb

eloquent in evasion, no lips moving
I’m an expert on how you feel
my face in neutral
my mask in place
sealed by polite gesture.

Wild Association

Yes, and sometimes you get what you wish for –
exclaiming birdsong at the expense of traffic,
and so what?
It’s not like you don’t long for the slow chugg
of the train, the skirl of the wheels on tracks.
The city looks for its people.
The measured pulling away of the man
in the tenement who builds a boat, looking for salt.
The taste of it. The pulling uprightness of it
as you head for the shore.
And here I am, a tall glass – ready to cheer.
As always, a subversive countryside speeds past, and who cares?
I’ve been in the background of someone’s remembering.
I’ve been a dream it is better not to share.
I can hear trouble three rooms away. Listen.
Sometimes the bed just seems softer, as if
you had remembered to write solitude, like salt
from an uprooted landscape.
The taste of it. The pulling uprightness of it
as you head for the shore.

Redeemed

‘I am in torment within, and in my heart I am disturbed’ – Lamentations

I held out for eternity giving it all to Him, I’m broken
a star that’s not functioning, absent now, still sending light.

The last shall be first
Blessed are the meek

Did you hear me?
Unlistening, you objectify me
ignore my voice, the one given
in dubious circumstances
of no consequence.

He was cut off from the land of the living

I died, ages ago, but not really
you still see me, learn from me:
the good in dying
the offering of pain
the eternity of prayer
asking Him to use me.

Surely He has borne our griefs
carried our sorrows

My face stares out, refuses
nihilism, embraces the paradox of pain
lives in suffering.
My voice cries out for eternity.

He was despised and rejected of men
All that see Him laugh Him to scorn

In prophetic photographs my eyes
document pain
minute to minute.
He must increase, I must decrease
worldly insignificant
eternally functional.
I held out for eternity.

I know that my Redeemer liveth

Mayday

My surgeon sings (he doesn’t know it)
his quiet song, how a blade can be tuneful!
Scribing all the right notes
hitting the correct tone
he dances in corridors where he thinks
I can’t see him, overcome
by his successful symphony.

He saves sonnets from grateful patients
to console himself in failure (although not often)
he is beside himself.

Strong in splenic virtue he clears octaves
merciless in accuracy
leaves me with more than a hymn
more than a psalm – somehow more in tune
with being lesser, in what I am.

It is accomplished.

21 Bells, Day to Day, Hour to Hour

‘By such strange means did I sustain a thousand starry nights in one’ – St. John of the Cross

Paint my canvas black, scrape to the light
dazzle a dark background.
Truth is its own reward, revealed
layer by layer, stripped back
no time for block denials.
Let the obvious become apparent.
Pity the man in self- denial:
see the light in darkness, feel the warmth
in cold, find a presence in absence –
that welcoming distance.
Is this a desert – this darkness
is this a landscape, are we there yet?
Sing the darkness, a skeleton of bells
a sharp shadow, an unforgiveness.
Contemplate the unforeseen:
allow a tiny space, a tiny space.

Bystander

Let’s talk about lastness:
the last casual conversation in a café
the last encounter with a stranger, the sadness of not knowing
our last visit, the smell of hand sanitiser
the last word with God.

It is a clear day, we see over to the Campsies
the other side of the Clyde valley
from St. Kentigern’s, the back of beyond of Glasgow.
We search for the grave, covered in thorns
a massive tree pushing the stone forward.
My husband hacks and hacks and chops and chops
pushing, snapping branches
fighting his way to those whom he loves
Mother, Father, Grandfather
hacks and hacks till their names become visible.
Mother, Father, Grandfather.

Nothing separates us from ourselves
unless we forget the past, so let’s talk about lastness.
The ability to forget the song I sing to myself
from my mother, from her mother, from our mothers.
The lullaby of your voice.
I would have it, if you gave it.

Commentary

It’s outside looking in, or inside looking out. It’s all about point of view. Staff in the Maggie’s Centre at Gartnavel are kind, thoughtful and compassionate. In reality though, it’s a place you’d rather not be, given the diagnosis. Framed in their windows, beautiful as they are, is the derelict Gartnavel Royal, a perfect metaphor encapsulating the place where patients find themselves or found themselves, in every sense. Ghosts abound, from shadows behind the fence, mirroring and mixing emotions, empathising with a fate you cannot escape.

It’s the view from somewhere you don’t want to be, looking at somewhere you’d rather not go, if you had the choice. However, life does not give you choices, or at least the choices you want. So these poems are written from that space, not exactly liminal, not exactly luminous but filled with out of reachness, or somehow out of the frame, or from what doesn’t appear to be the centre, but is.

From his prison in Toledo St. John of the Cross experienced not just physical darkness, but spiritual. As any artist will tell you, there is no light without darkness. There is no contrast if there is no shade. Scraping back the darkness reveals light. The light St. John experienced in darkness is a paradox few can understand or would want to. But his poetry is in every sense luminous, especially in darkness and that is what I’ve tried to explore here.

When the world shifts and everything is inexplicable, when no one else’s experience mirrors yours, madness might be the only sane place to be – that’s why the view from Maggie’s is so profound, finding an echo in the past and a key to the future. Call it faith, or love, generations have lamented before us, we feel it in the Gartnavel soil, in the ground they walked on. Whatever lives or moves in us, lives and moves us. Something is pulling us upright. Something, or Someone cares for us, knows us better than we know ourselves. Being called back, out of darkness, that’s the challenge – easier somehow to play dead. Called to participate in a different life, out of step with everyone else leaves us open to the charge of eccentricity, at the very least. The only choice is to come back better.

Our response to pain – compassion – is what makes us truly human. And what makes us divine.

Glib answers are easy. Kindness is hard earned: it can be hard to admit we don’t want it. Or troubles are so many we can be too numb to react at all. Or sometimes, so ecstatic we’ve been ‘cured’ that we appear to be coping when we are not. These are all valid responses. Honesty means the unsayable is indeed said. That is truly the view from Maggie’s.

Darkness needs an airing. Anything hidden festers. Let the light in.