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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  John Reed

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Clinic

John Reed

From “Hospital Notes”

SQUARE white cells, all in a row, with ground-glass windows;

Tubes treasuring sacraments of suffering, rubber pipes, apparatus;

Walls maculate with old yellow and brown….

Out of a mass of human flesh, hairy and dull,

Slim shining steel grows, dripping slow pale thick drops,

And regularly, like distant whistles in a fog, groaning….

Young internes, following the great surgeon like chicks a hen,

Crowd in as he pokes, wrenches, and dictates over his shoulder,

And hurries on, deaf to the shuddering spirit, rapt in a dream of machinery.