The hospital sails
like a tall ship
down the crease of the valley.
I am stabilised
mid-mast
laid out on a wide white bed
head facing east.
The first poem in my wide white bed, Trish Harris’s poetic memoir of an eight week stay in Lower Hutt Hospital, places her in bed, pinned out and pinned down. She is in pain, she has lots to worry about but she has a window to look out from and lots of company – sometimes more company than she would like. She can’t go anywhere or get out of bed. She can’t avoid the noises of peoples’ bodies and she can’t escape from her own body.
But Harris can write in her journal and that helps. Harris talks about the journal in one of the poems.
The surgeon is over the flu
and Doris is back for her knee.
She is gowned and waits.
The sun catches her face
Holding it all in.
She has been here before.
She spies me in the corner
grafted onto the bed.
What are you doing?
she asks.
Doodling
I mumble.
Our wide white days
emerge as words in my book
become prayers that I chant
grow into hopes for an updraught.

The collection has many moods. Most often, and underneath, I think it has a feeling for which there is no word in English, something like patient-resigned-impatient-scared-brave-amused-shocked-intrigued-grossed out-kind-sad. Whatever is going on in the ward, Harris is good company. Her writing has an openness and warmth that make you want to hear what she says next. You certainly wouldn’t have to be a poetry reader to enjoy my wide white bed. Anyone who has experience of hospitals, from any perspective, would find the collection impossible to put down.
The poems don’t have individual titles, which means that as you read them, you feel as if you have opened a diary or a journal and happened on an account of something that mattered to the writer. There is just enough of a sense of a story to keep you turning the pages and feeling satisfied with a sense of a beginning, a middle and an end. But the narrative is not really the point. The point is everything that Harris takes notice of along the way. Harris is always willing to learn something from the people around her. Sometimes what she sees is not what she expects.
It is 6pm.
A woman pushes a trolley into the room
asks if we want a hot drink.
She doesn’t look at us. Her legs lift slowly.
We are sick, stuck in these beds.
The least she could do is smile.
How long have you been working?
Since 6am.
The blue curtain, which provides a strange sort of half-privacy, appears in several poems. In the night though, everything is public.
Behind the blue curtain
A woman strains.
Another throws up.
A new admission
arrives, distraught.
The nurse says
You’re okay here.
Someone snores.
Lucky them.
Privacy, shame and intimacy come up several times, as anyone who has been in hospital would expect. ‘Oh, for the return of a private life’, Harris says and you can feel her longing. Every scrap of kindness counts in this situation, and Harris tells us about lots of kindnesses. Sometimes they are physical and practical.
The new nurse dispenses
Slaps on the bottom
To get circulation going
A blow-dry down below
When thrush gets too much
And jolliness.
Sometimes Harris quotes words people have used that struck a chord, such as the nurse with the ‘soft-timbred voice, who reaches across the fear and says We want to help you get on top of your pain’. Harris tunes in to scraps of conversation. She listens to nurses, patients, tea-ladies, cleaners, doctors, physios, the chaplain and visitors. Harris’s words are laconic and understated in a very Kiwi wa,y but cannot conceal her warmth and respect for all these people.
My wide white bed could also be read as a report on the state of public hospital provisions in the year of Harris’s surgery.
The nurse knows you
feel better after a back wash
a bottom wash
an all-over slosh.
The nurse knows you
feel better with clean teeth
a wiped face
fresh sheets.
She never says
We do not have enough sheets
or clean pillow slips
or green bowls
or warm water.
You are in hospital in New Zealand after all.
If someone wrote about a stay in hospital this year, I wonder if the report would be as positive.
Lynn Jenner practised as a psychologist and counsellor for twenty-five years before taking up serious writing at the age of 49. She has also worked as a researcher. Her first book, Dear Sweet Harry, won the NZ Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Lynn’s website is pinklight.nz.
Trish Harris works in Communications. She has also worked as a tutor, an editor and run a small card and calendar business. Her memoir, The Walking Stick Tree,includes narrative, personal essays and illustrations. my wide white bed (Landing Press, 2017) is her debut poetry collection.
Read Trish Harris’s article on Corpus: Going public with very personal stories.
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