Aunt Judy’s going home tomorrow. The hospice stuff should be set up and ready by the time she gets home. We’re sitting here in the hospital waiting room, I’m checking my email, and there’s the latest American Life in Poetry column. The poem’s title? “Hospital.”

American Life in Poetry
By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places–both familiar and
foreign–looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in
this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new–made strange–by close
observation.

Hospital

It seems so–
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk–
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop–ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be–
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.