Last distraction for the day before I get down to some work: Michael's great poem about the Dorothys reminded me of one of mine which I set out below (published in the Interpreter's House a while back)

THE OLD DEARS

(Words in Retirement)

I was drifting through that neighbourhood

In visiting hours for the twilight ward

And thought I should drop in on Myriad.

Will you look at what the cat’s brought in!

She said from her pillows, newly thin.

Not that ill then, Myriad, I grinned.

Better than her, she sotto voce’d,

Nodding her flattened greasy head

At toothless Lest wheezing on the next bed,

And poor Mrs Fain died last Thursday:

She had no visitors, such a shame,

And no-one’s come to take her things away.

All those tests but they still don’t know what’s wrong;

If you ask me, they’re all charlatans.

They dump us here when we’ve lived too long.

Then came their offspring in a burly ruck,

Middle-aged and mostly out of work,

Written off as too telling or too abstract:

Unsafe Peter, worthless Tom, graceless Grace,

Joyless Joy, others I could not place,

Full of anger and self-righteousness -

Mes semblables; there but for the grace …

Better go. You’ll soon be right as rain,

I said, thinking She’ll not see home again

And singing Heigh ho defenceless old dears,

Valiant workhorses of yesteryear,

See-through skin and bare-eyed in the sere.