GHOST HOSPITAL

The Cambridge Military Hospital

                    photo:  The Hampshire Independent.

Watching the bulldozers from the roadside,

it's hard to believe my eyes.

What sacrilege is this? In a short time

it will be no more - not in it's present form anyway,

but will have become yet more housing no one can afford

nor ever really wanted. Greed. That's all it is.

And it's Soul will be consigned to purgatory,

taking with it all those who throughout it's long history

have fallen totally under its spell.

But what they fail to understand, these developers,

is the legacy of their actions: deaf ears 

to the heart-rending cries in tumbling walls, the old voices

that still catch in my throat.

And in the rising dust, I see a face

I saw in a mirror some thirty years back,

her blonde hair shimmering in a broken window pane.

Has she really remained here for so many years,

still clinging to these eerie darting shadows?

And when the devastation is complete, what then?

When the occupants move in, will she stay

along with all those others who languish still

within time's endlessly repeating loop?

There is so much they don't know

about this living relic they're tearing apart.

Materialistic eyes cannot see beyond their own avarice.

There is no respect for the multitudes of disfigured servicemen,

nor for all the rest of the battered and broken humanity that has passed

through these hallowed corridors...or those

like myself, one time patients who have left

traces of themselves in these ethereal wards

that will remain here, unseen, until the end of time.