THE NURSE

by: CHERYL L. DAYTEC-YANGOT

The Nurse

(for Thelma)

She came a stranger to this once-peculiar

Place. Four seasons.  Undergrounds.

Fish-and-chips. Haggis. Royal ghosts

A place whose poor are not the poorest

Back home

Her father raised the money

To grow  wings on her feet

For that better life than he ever had

But some nights, listening  to cries

Uttered in a mix of  distress and English

She would weep in her mothertongue

The walls the  audience

Of her ineffable solitude

Of her yen for home

Despite the blight of want there

Her father would say over the phone,

It will pass. Stay put

You will find there the bed of roses

I prepared you for

It will be home

He was right

The strangeness of the place

Transformed it into  home

After  she responded to the buzzer

One  thousand  times

Chronic cases

Terminal cases

She was needed here

Relevance  made a place a home

As much as  language, as much as roots

It became joy to  embrace humanity’s pain

Helping it

Fend off  the sinister man with the scythe

Or bravely confront and trounce  him

Or listen to the oft-talked about gentle  voice

Urging a soul to return to its body

As it is about to reach a dark tunnel’s end

Her heart had shed tears

As her hands pulled the zipper over lifeless faces

Imagining how crestfallen

Loved ones must be more than she was

Just yesterday before the terrible news came

She injected  morphine  into unfledged veins

Praying that  a premature journey to the other side

Would  be like the dance of an autumn leaf

To the gale, graceful  as it falls to the ground

Becoming dust one day

She had lost sleep for over a hundred patients

And kept their  names

From being carved on gravestones

Some of them still stay in touch

London became  home despite

Late night hours. Arrogant doctors’ moods

Harsh winter morning shifts. Graveyard shifts

Her father had always been proud of her

Over the phone, he would say

You have a heart several times

Bigger than  the average

Your  hands warmer than normal

Now,

At Heathrow Airport, she anxiously awaits

Her flight back home to the Philippines

To bury her father. Pneumonia. Lung cancer

Complications.  She never wiped his brows

Furrowed by pain. He never saw his daughter’s

Bedside manner, never felt the  hands

With a heart  several times  more huge

Than the average size he was so proud of

She was his daughter, everyone else’s

Nurse.