Royal Hospital, Donnybrook, May 2023
(for Lisa Cogan)
Whatever you do, don’t fall, the medics had advised,
yet whatever I did I kept falling, if not in the street,
or trying to board the Dart, then (for heaven’s sake!)
tripping over myself in the safety of my bedroom.
In the past, of course, I have had other falls: not just
the customary childhood tumbles, but in my adult years,
whether falling asunder from excess, or else those falls
from grace as I came up short of life’s u rgent demands.
But it’s back now to physical falls, and so it is I reside
yet again in the Royal hospital, formerly of the incurables,
where an exhuberant, irreverent team endeavour to cure me
of my foolish ailments and resume the faltering walk of life.
