Hi and welcome to my series The Hairbag Poet.

This week is National Nurses Week, and today my post is dedicated to all of the amazing nurses I have had the privilege to work beside, and all of the nurses working so hard around the globe. National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6th and ends on May 12th, Florence Nightingale’s birthday. 2020 has been designated by The World Health Organization as The Year of the Nurse and Midwife.

For those nurses who know me, you all know I have a slight obsession with vintage nurse fiction. I have been wanting to write a found poem using the titles of these books for a long time. According to Poetry Foundation (2020) a found poem is “A prose text or texts reshaped by a poet into quasi-metrical lines. Fragments of found poetry may appear within an original poem as well.”

Though I left bedside nursing last fall to begin a career in academia, I have written this piece from the perspective of the nurses voices I have been reading over the past month. I hope you enjoy this vintage found nurse poem!

COVID -19 Disaster Nurse

 

I woke a Nurse on Nightmare Island

Trapped in a House of Hate.

A Small Town Nurse,
,
A Nurse in Doubt,

Where Murder Stalks Ward 8!

My angel wings
are weighted
in a viral alabaster,
you see I am
a New Yorker Nurse,

a Nurse in a Disaster!

What started as
The Mystery
in the doctor’s office,

has spread through the community
infecting those incautious.

This Terror Stalks the Night Nurse,

But it’s every Nurse’s Dilemma,

to protect themselves, and patient’s
from this viruses agenda.

There are days my brain screams
Run, Nurse Run,

Just run, get the hell out!
But Fugitive Nurse

is not my style,
In time we’ll turnabout.

Some people think
The Nurse Knows Best,

but I’m a
Nurse in Doubt,

‘cause no one seems to have
this fucking virus
figured out!

Sometimes we all forget
Nurses are People

just like you.
Once a nurse…but always a woman

we have family; loved one’s too.

Sometimes I like to daydream
of the nurse I’d like to be:
a Night Club
,
Jet Set,
Surfing,Island,Hootenanny me!

or what exotic place I could be found practicing my skills:
The Everglades
,
or Hollywood?Whatever pays the bills!

It’s times like these
you’ll understand
The Making of a Nurse,
,
it’s what we’ve all been trained for,
our career’s not risk averse.

Some see us as their heroes;
Lighted angels in the night,
but we know of our darker side,
and joke, Sinners in White.
.

How funny, but My Moment of Truth

is not this epidemic,
It’s the viral spread of nurse’s love
that’s globally systemic!

 

Once again Happy Nurses Week to all the nurses all over the world!

Be safe,

The Hairbag Poet