Barrow – Poem

The young doctor was amazed.

Did you really work at Barrow?

He looked at me, as though from another age,

and then we met a woman, brought in by the police,

and she knew me – you were at Barrow, she said.

And she smiled as though we'd shared something good,

even though on different sides.

I went back to Coombe Villa once

just for old time's sake,

trying to recall that far away feeling,

of a place apart.

But it was boarded up, the garden overgrown,

like a field coming right up to the windows,

and someone had scrawled across it,

Where have they gone?

I meet them still, in town,

and I know they're freer now.

No one keeps you in

a moment longer than required:

it's a human right.

They wouldn't go back for anything

to sitting there for weeks on end

waiting to be discharged.

But sometimes they tell me how much they miss it.

And I remember the slowness of it all,

we took such time.

It's a slow process, I used to say.

It was another age,

we did things differently then.

This poem has been republished by the BJPsych from the collection ‘The Ruins of Summer’ by David Whitwell.