Weekend Rounds
On Sundays the hospital
Is quiet as a weekday church
The high-ceilinged atrium
Like an empty nave.
Linoleum floors, empty waiting area chairs
And long halls that take you anywhere.
The silent OR is a dull gray catacomb
While the chaplain is down the street
At the nursing home.
The patients are all upstairs
Swaddled in beds
Behind doors in private rooms
Like sins hidden in the heart
Hollowing out bones
Festering in a stye,
Waiting to be tended to
By doctors making rounds.
Everyone gets seen—
Broken hip, productive cough
Post-op colon, rule out MI
No one takes a day off.
2/5/24
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