The young doctor was amazed.
Did you really work at Barrow?
He looked at me, as though from another age,
and then we met a woman, brought in by the police,
and she knew me – you were at Barrow, she said.
And she smiled as though we'd shared something good,
even though on different sides.
I went back to Coombe Villa once
just for old time's sake,
trying to recall that far away feeling,
of a place apart.
But it was boarded up, the garden overgrown,
like a field coming right up to the windows,
and someone had scrawled across it,
Where have they gone?
I meet them still, in town,
and I know they're freer now.
No one keeps you in
a moment longer than required:
it's a human right.
They wouldn't go back for anything
to sitting there for weeks on end
waiting to be discharged.
But sometimes they tell me how much they miss it.
And I remember the slowness of it all,
we took such time.
It's a slow process, I used to say.
It was another age,
we did things differently then.
This poem has been republished by the BJPsych from the collection ‘The Ruins of Summer’ by David Whitwell.
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