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Picture No 10800422 © Photo Researchers / Mary Eva

The Commiphora Myrrh Tree
by Wendy French

 
Physician heal thyself
for P. H.
First British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology

 
They wound the trees to bleed them of their resin,
pictures demonstrate fact and him, dead.

Up the stairs to sleep she thinks about him –
deceased, rubbed out.

And she is wounded like the trees
they bleed for resin.

He, twenty years her senior, so at ease in the world
why leave it so suddenly?

Did he lose direction from his lab into the mortuary
and then not know how to exit?

Did he die wondering about all he’d pioneered?
Were his heart, paintings, violin, aspirations over-ruled,

voted out as he was left on a cold slab, in a busy hospital,
an unremarkable day, his own autopsy?

And had he watched the bleeding of the trees
to collect the resin for this myrrh, his present from Jerusalem?

The crystals sit on the kitchen table.
Trees are wounded or so he taught her:

Atrial Fibrillation
(he teased over dinner would never enter a poem)

but there is a lingering strain around these words,
a quest for further knowledge.

An unremarkable day, his own autopsy.
There must be a way to stop the trees from bleeding.

 
© Wendy French
 
Picture No 10800422 © Photo Researchers / Mary Evans
 

Wendy French has three collections of poetry published: Splintering the Dark (Rockingham Press, 2005), surely you know this (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and Thinks Itself A Hawk (Hippocrates Press, 2016), the latter resulting from her time as Poet in Residence at the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre, 2014-2015. She was joint editor with Dilys Wood of Fanfare (Second Light, 2015), a book of poems written by women poets, and also co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Prof Michael Hulse and Prof Donald Singer. She won the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize (NHS section) in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS (Hippocrates Press, 2013). She has judged or co-judged three major poetry competitions: the Torbay International Competition, the Torriano Competition and the Tongues and Grooves 10-year celebration competition, as well as the Hippocrates International Poetry Competition for poems relating to medicine or the body. For the past twenty years she has facilitated creative writing in healthcare settings, having finished her formal teaching career as head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in 2003.

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