A Botanist’s Life
In a cleaved dream, we are standing
all afternoon near an ancient medicine shop
with coloured window panes – the Belgian type .
Is it a church? We take a trip, in turn,
to watch it in subsequent dreams
In its courtyard,
the mobile messages of the whole family
rebound like ancient ping pong balls
Just opposite the medicine shop,
a red patch of ordinary lilies covers
whatever is lost in the scene – the philosophy
of kinship, decaying pumpkin leaves, smell of
an approaching disease
and other follies of living a botanist’s life
Old Pharmacy School
The red water tank near the old Pharmacy School
Seeps its red into every patients’ water glass
It is a daily diet. I converse
with a bored parking fee collector, a former romantic
who would change his job
for an evening attendant in a sleazy wine shop
Does he despise the maladies and the steel-frames
of the new automobiles ?
I ask the ancient water tank, painted red,
by a ailing sub-contractor, by now dead
At every corridor of the Trainee Nurses’ Hostel,
stands a batch of adolescent nurses
I watch
A broken chain of aged red moths flit
around their white skirts
They gossip about the medicine
bottles kept in the pharmacy lab