Postcards from Malthusia DAY SEVENTY-SIX: Steve Griffiths

 We knew how to make it

 

The NHS is a talisman.

The stories lose their anchor in these winds.

What we love is stripped of function

then revealed anew.

 

What we had done was magicked from our hands.

Is this too much to ask:

on our skew-whiff plot of blather,

can we make the motor go again

 

when we’ve forgotten how,

heads together, all found in the task?

It’s both new and old,

this line from the physician and the midwife

 

to the app and back again,

stopping on the way to listen

to patient, neighbour, child and citizen.

Then get what wants telling told.

 

 

Steve Griffiths is a poet and former poverty and health inequality researcher, always a campaigner.  His Weathereye: Selected Poems appeared last year.    www.stevegriffithspoet.com