Jean Kent #2 'Who is Margaret?' Response to Judith Beveridge's 'Breath'

Who is Margaret?

The woman across the corridor
is only breath now. 
At 7 pm, she falls

into sleep—and I hear her,
regularly gasping
                             air in, air out,
as if she is a breathing machine, a bellows
being pumped … as if
this is her only purpose now.

Each morning the nurses resurrect her.
Clearer than the dawn gargle of magpies
they call: “Hullo Margaret.
Are you Margaret?
Is your date of birth … 1929?
Do you want to go to the toilet?
We have to take a sample …”

Like distant wind through casuarinas,
there is a moan, then Margaret
becomes silence again.

All day she is a name
medical staff tuba through the ward.
A scramble of writing on a file,
a chart of temperatures and infections.
Nighties in a drawer, a hairbrush, toothpaste …
In the bed, a shrinking shape.

The dietician visits, bright as spoons
clunking in and out of bowls.
                          “You’re too thin, Margaret.
We have to fatten you up. You want spaghetti
for breakfast? You can have it.
You want ice cream? You can have it, any time—”

Margaret the bundle of bones frail as a wren
replies with a sound of ruffled feathers.
She fluffs up her down and doesn’t eat
the glossy worms.

Each afternoon, from three till seven,
her family hang banners of conversation
round her bed. She becomes
a faint festival of murmuring,
a dying queen the hive
is trying to revive.

 As soon as they go, there’s nothing left 

but the breathing machine, a darkness
where mangroves suck up life until morning.

The restless ward sputters into the night
a little longer, snoring, gulping oblivion
from the TV sets above the beds…
Across the corridor, in the murkier dam
of my own sleeplessness, I try to become
a tadpole, deaf in the mud

until those birds return, parroting
“Are you Margaret?”

and I hear that wish-ing moan,
wheezing away the echo of the owl in the night:
                                           WHO are YOU?
as Margaret’s name, again
is a wren

the last cheeps of her voice
are trying to fly back to.