Florence Nightingale & Nursing

Three poet-nurses, featuring work by Marilee Pritchard, Laura Secord and Mary Hennessy.
7 minutes

TRANSCRIPT

Florence Nightingale. She’s considered by many the founder of modern nursing. She trained nurses during the Crimean War and apparently reduced death rates significantly by improving hygiene and living standards. Stories of her wandering around at night checking on wounded soldiers led to her nickname “The Lady With the Lamp.” Florence Nightingale was born May 12, 1820 and lived to be 90 years old. To commemorate Florence Nightingale’s birthday, three pieces written by nurses—or former nurses—all three pieces about women.

Marilee Pritchard spent part of her career as a psychiatric nurse working with adolescents. Here’s a poem she wrote about her own adolescence, specifically her first date with the man who would become her husband. “Take Me Along for the Ride.”

Just 17 years old – you, not quite 21
Riding the blue line to Greektown on Halsted Street.
Thunderclap of castanets, wail of bouzouki,
Lady of the belly – beaded, bangled,
Audacious in tiger pants and seven veils.
Salome twerking Herod Antipas
For the head of the Baptist.
I who never traveled anywhere
More exotic than Wisconsin –
Who had been intimate
Only with words
Ate my way through
Pastitsio, souvlakia, galaktoboureko.

You peered down my strapless dress,
A retaining wall for beginner breasts
As you spoke with awe
About banned beat writer, Henry Miller,
While I told you how Jack Kennedy
Was gunned down in the middle of my logic class.
Too young to drink, unfamiliar with cover charge,
We ran out of cash.
You called your mother.
Come get us in a cab. Bring money.

She called me girly all the way home,
Asked why I carried only six quarters
And a pack of Marlboros in my clutch bag.
Told us both: you’ve got a lot to learn.
You walked me to the door.
Courageously,
Kissed me good night –

Six months out – a long good-bye . . .
Treacherous journey
Troop ship
Bound for Viet Nam.

Marilee Pritchard’s poem “Take Me Along for the Ride” from Passager’s Winter 2020 issue.

Laura Secord spent 30 years as a clinical nurse practitioner in HIV care. Here’s her poem about the joy and power of women’s friendships, “The Shadow Blasters.”

There were two old women
spitting cherry pits against the sky
causing a hailstorm in the middle of July;

two bold old women, big and round,
laughing and cackling together as they run;

two ancient bread dough kneaders
flop on tire tubes down river,
their floating thighs like dumplings in a tide.

Two all-you-can-eat old women drift
downstream to a place where they can bleed again
with dripping maiden red;

they flow by sunning turtles, and
their sweet blood trail entices horn-
shelled nibbles to their fleshy hinds.

Oh, explosive vessels
riding lazy river way,
and oh, their ravished banter

three-toed boxers splashing,
two old women laughing, turtle lips
snapping, cheers and clapping;
and oh, the clamoring shadows
running away in fear, far from the thundering
path of two old women.

“The Shadow Blasters” by Laura Secord from Passager’s Winter 2017 issue.

Mary Hennessy was a nurse most of her adult life until, she said, she returned to school and fell in with a community of generous, word-crazed people. This poem, she said, is in response to an Iranian film she saw. “My Heart Is a Parking Lot.”

Kids ride bikes there. A
blue bird bathes in a puddle
of oily rainbows, then shakes
herself out like a wet hanky. Sends
beauty’s shock waves
into a world that is the sole
occupant of a sick bed. Look,
there! A drone
flaps its wings like a bird
above a November maple. Ablaze.
I thought it was the Holy Ghost.
Then, like the horsemen
of the apocalypse,
four ladies wearing chadors
on electric bikes join us in loop de loops
around the light poles.

In an Iranian movie
we watched last week, a woman
in a tangle of burqa, is in a bicycle race.
Her name is Ahoo. Her husband,
father, and a “holy” man
on horseback chase her down.
Curse her. Wordless, she refuses
to be distracted. Her husband divorces
her on the spot. She still refuses
to stop, her black veil whipping.
Lastly, come her brothers
galloping hard. The camera pulls back
so we can’t see exactly what
happens. But they take her bike,
so she cannot finish a race she was
winning.

Ahoo, over here! Dark angel with wings,
take mine.

Mary Hennessy’s poem “My Heart Is a Parking Lot” from Passager Issue 73.

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For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.

Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.