Poems by Leila Platt

Patient humans
We are all human, we all have skin, bones and bodies,
But our frailest of organs you can not see with the naked eye.
You fill us with pills, white, blue, yellow and tell us we managed on them yesterday.
What has changed?
We make similar beeps as you when you test us with the obs machine,
But no one lays hands on the head that needs healing.
You, the ones, giving the pills, you have mental health too.
You become anxious when things ‘don’t go right’,
Or maybe they just don’t feel right.
In fact things that heal our bodies cannot always heal our minds.
Pills distort, dampen, punctuate days, demand compliance,
And dictate complacency in our management.
We seem cared for because we are given our pills,
Pills we don’t choose because we don’t have that knowledge.
Well I beg you to listen, you, the prescriber, do not have my knowledge either.
You see the colour red but is it the same as my colour red?
You may have seen and heard of deaths but not the same ones as me.
You eat foods, maybe the same as me, but what do you taste?
You have not tumbled down into the same hole that I try every day to climb out of.
If you did, you would realise I landed down here without a ladder or a map,
Then I hasten to suggest that you too would struggle.
What I need to do is write, explain, but the words in my head are a jumble.
Not smooth and deserving of crisp pages,
Angular and wearing like sharp edges.
We need green, the colour helps to calm they say,
But not if that is a tree falling on you,
And earthy colours,
But not if that is the soil smothering you.
I need to write and to talk and to tell my truth.
That truth may hurt, but it remains my truth.
Smackdown 2020
It feels like a battle every day,
As we tussle with news and other people's views.
More akin to a war or a wrestling match
Than an international healthcare emergency.
Whose voice do we listen to when
When it feels like those who lead us are unshackled?
We are left in the storm,
Some literally left out in the rain.
An international healthcare emergency.
Who’s fighting for those who cannot?

Nothing about me without me

Constantly writing notes and doing your checks
Checking for what?
What I have, you cannot see.
I hazard a guess that I would not make sense
Of your scribbles, but they remain recorded.
Forever.
Yet it still stands
Nothing about me without me.
Mid Year Endings
It reached the time for me to leave
One ending is another beginning.
Even though I am going back to what I know,
Things still feel uncertain.
“You get to sleep in your own bed”
Is the common promise.
That bed was my prison some days,
Not too long ago.
I’d rather no bed than that prison again.
Time to focus on other new beginnings,
The garden, the green and the longest days of June.
The mid year ends, the mid year starts.
I carry on.

Turquoise Goddess
Every day I look at you.
Your small but perfect form
Translucent in the morning light.
A turquoise pearl in my hand.
I’d like to make necklace
Of you and your sisters.
But I take water
And swallow you instead.
Drowning in Custard
Breakfast, Lunch, Tea and Supper
Eight, Twelve, Five and Nine.
Every day.
Porridge, Pie, Sandwich, Toast.
Puddings.
Drowning in custard.
Meals punctuate our hospital day,
Waiting to for what we will eat today,
And wondering what we might have tomorrow.
We can’t cook, sometimes neither can they,
They have kind eyes behind the masks,
The people who serve meals.
So we eat, digest and thank.
Porridge,
Pie
Sandwich
Toast.
Would you like custard with that?