Craig y Nos by Natalie Holborow
You were eight when you got the
infection.
All day long, that terrible
racket hacked
through the bleached sanatorium
where day after day
mucus slapped the roof of your
mouth,
sliding salt-green down the ridge
where your furred tongue was huge
and parched for weeks, barely
able
to pant the word dwr.
Your native language sucked away
through a hypodermic needle.
The last time you saw Aileen
Morgan,
she was all sore angles beside
her bed.
Stripped from the sheets with the
fever,
shuddering in her nightdress,
you remarked softly on her pretty
red scarf
twisting like blood through the
bars.
It was years before you got over
the sight
of her drug-shattered face on the
pillow,
torso shapeless and white.
The nurses let loose her cold
fingers
and tucked the scarf into a box.
You were wheeled on your beds to
the balcony.
In hushed voices, they said
the cool Welsh winds worked
miracles
if they did not kill you off. One
morning Hywel
raised a sick arm of chicken-flesh,
tinder-bone:
please Nurse, I’m cold in a little voice.
She slapped his face with a
gloveless hand.
Every morning before sunrise, she
proofed herself
against tuberculosis in folds of
starch and cotton,
scrubbed her hands by
candlelight.
Scissors grinned from her
breast-pocket.
Every day some child folded
himself like a nautilus,
hacking his rags of lung softly
into a pillow.
Turning your face to see children
rise up the wall through the
ether,
your sternum became a birdcage;
your glockenspiel ribs all about
you.
It troubled you all those years
later,
silver-haired in your bedroom.
The shock
of a blotchy photograph slid out
of a drawer.
The involuntary memory of
accordion-lungs,
balcony talk. Aileen’s skeleton
wrapped in a scarf.
Like a cough, the children of
Craig-Y-Nos,