Jigsaw

This red-brick building is cavernous with the memory
of hospitals in childhood, then replete
with echoes and the fretful whimpering
of children grizzling over missing
pieces of the jigsaw, suffering … There,
nurses wore black stockings and there on long wooden
benches outpatients sat in rows: mothers
with dutiful arms around their offspring, stoic
in the presence of what then were ever-present
long- or short-term dangers: whooping-cough, diphtheria,
scarlet fever, polio (that cruel permanent
tripper-up of growing limbs). Sometimes there
white-coated doctors in that other world
were followed by an entourage
of students … Revisiting hospitals now, all of
seventy years later there is still
an echo of that earlier time
(its crispness and its busyness); we follow
directions to the wards down corridors, holding still
ambiguous pieces of the universal puzzle in our hands,
masking too (just as our mothers once did in those cavernous halls)
our awarenesses with the same attentive tenderness.