FALLING ANGELS
Comrades of physicians,
More useful than a priest they stand
Bound by paperwork, short on hands,
Rarely ever short on caring,
Just drained of energy and sleep.
Male or female, angels are androgynous;
Wingless yet celestial:
A nurse is forever a nurse.
Yet beneath the prowling politician’s mask,
Hidden by their ‘caring’ camouflage
Dark hearts are lurking on the hustings
Electioneering evil, their moneyed masquerade
A catalogue of flawed belief.
Such are the methods of the City thief;
A conviction that all human souls
Are up for sale.
If every man and woman has their price,
Minister, investor, tell me this:
How do you privatise a nurse’s mind?
Where is your dividing line
Between profit and compassion?
From their wee small hours on darkened wards,
Let the busy, silent nurses speak.
Whilst corks pop from your Bollinger,
I collect the bedpans, whilst you wallow
In some shareholding haze
That gilded glade where profit blooms
Whilst I push trolley loads of pain
Into the healing, sterile rooms
Where lives will hang upon the straining thread
Of your insatiable greed.
And as you scheme and calculate
To tabulate my fiscal worth,
I still dispense thin oxygen of hope
I work where time is tight with saline drips
A catheter, syringe.
And as my long shift ends I wonder;
To my aid, what will you bring?
Survival of the richest,
not treatment of the sickest?
Will you let me do my job,
Will you grant me any hope?
And when the time arrives for you
To occupy a bed,
Will your profits help me cope?
Don’t think your cash can purchase nursing
Forget the market
And its narcotic rush
The angels aren’t for falling,
No matter how you push.