Accident & Emergency by Nessa O’Mahony
An unforgiving look this week at the devaluation of old age in modern society
Landing with a bump in A&E.
Time travelling merrily across the centuries like Old Nick, as we do on Poem of the week, it’s easy to notice how concepts of poetry have radically changed. Poets used to be issued with a standard set of prosodic tools and inheritance of topics, attitudes, tropes and metaphors. Of course, these borrowed clothes, it was agreed, should be restitched and worn as if new for the poetry to be admired and remembered. However, there was a classically guaranteed foundation on which to build the originality, and a basic aesthetic contract between the poet and his (mostly, his) similarly educated society of readers and listeners. The contract begins to alter some time before the 20th century, but that’s a long story, and a different blog. Here in 2009, there are as many poets as there are beliefs, and rows, about poetry. Call it diversity or democracy – it makes for a rich aesthetic brew, but one that confuses audiences, or splits them into consumer groups so tiny that poets sometimes feel, to borrow Simon Armitage’s apt analogy, as if they’re shouting down a toilet bowl.
But there are unchanging themes. Time’s passing is one of the major human obsessions, and poetry can’t let it alone, despite the fact that there is little intrinsically new to say. The discovery that the grim reaper comes not only for grandma and grandpa, he comes for your parents and he’s coming for you, provides our sharpest moments of maturation. Poetry clings to what matters most to us, and cruel death and time’s rapid passing matter most of all. The art of verse is time-obsessed in its very structure. The rhythmic line ticks along, stops and starts, breathes in and out and finally breathes its last, at which point the poet feels more cheerful. Every poet secretly hopes what Shakespeare dared write: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Art is better than Botox when it comes to arguing with the crass old philistine, time. Simply to write or read a poem puts time on hold, or at least temporarily controls it. The poem may not outlive the poet, but it always outlives the moment of its conception, delicately hammering passing thoughts into what Yeats called in Sailing to Byzantium “the artifice of eternity”.
This week’s poem by Dublin-born writer Nessa O’Mahony begins appropriately with a nod to Yeats’s magnificent poem. We come down with a bump in A&E – and even here, the self-indulgent young are in favour. The voice of the poem begins angry. As the narrative develops, it seems more detached, and begins to resemble the voice we expect from someone old – the voice of patience and wry humour. Little jokes (“Eighth on the list”, “You’d need a calendar in here” ) poignantly reinforce the sense of resignation.
Yet, the poem is unforgiving. It deplores the hospital’s implied hierarchy of care. The devaluation of old age isn’t simply a matter of an overworked or inefficient health service, though: the young do actually “forget” that for the old, the calendar might not contain many years or even many months. O’Mahony’s A&E department is a microcosm of western society. Ageing brings fear and fixed attitudes – not only to those in wheelchairs. The liturgical diction here and there (“moveable feast”, “ordained”) hints at an imprisoning dogma.
In the last two lines, to “forget/ how time passes” means, perhaps, to forget how quickly time passes. It could also mean to forget in what way time passes for the old. Above all, the final generalisation bears a message to the forgetful, a quiet memo to say “it’s your time that’s passing, too”.
The carpe diem tradition is touched on. The old aren’t, of course, being urged to make use of their time. But, between the lines, the poem asks society to make time for the old. A set of observations rooted in our modern, urban world, in which individuals are often lost in the institutions set up to protect them. It shows how poetry’s most traditional theme can be revalidated and subtly challenged in the light of our own contemporary values – or lack of them.
O’Mahony is currently artist in residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin, and writing a novel on a 19th-century Irishman who exhibited himself at Fairgrounds on the Pacific Rim. Her verse-novel, In Sight of Home, has recently been published by Salmon. Bar Talk, her first collection, can be read here. Trapping a Ghost, her second, can be seen here. Other work is online here.
Accident & Emergency
That is no country for old men;
the youth get sloshed
and stagger through double doors,
tattoos on their arms,
eyes stoned.
The old men wait,
knowing their turn
is a moveable feast,
despite the bluecoat’s promises
they are eighth on the list.
And still they wait,
observe the to and fro,
the quick dispatch
of those who arrived
much later than they,
assess whose recovery
would seem the better bet.
Day crawls into night,
the digital clock
a silent mockery,
(you’d need a calendar in here)
names called,
anyone’s but theirs.
Glued to wheelchairs,
their motions
are at the whim
of orderlies.
The old men wait;
they know they have no choice.
It has been ordained
by those who perhaps forget
how time passes.
__________
Full article and photo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jun/01/poem-of-the-week-nessa-omahony
