[Susan McLean]

David, your final couplet is far too soft-focus for me. My sister's father-in-law died on one of those NHS waiting lists, and her husband recently had a close call on another one. It's a great system in theory, and I am willing to assume good will on the part of most of the medical staff, though Love may be going too far. I can remember being vulnerable in a hospital, and the intense gratitude one feels to anyone for their help at that time. But.

Susan

[Julie Steiner]

I took the final couplet as intentionally naive. The narrator and reader both know that the MRI techs are not really saint-like, just as they both know that the MRI techs are not really extraterrestrials.

I've certainly encountered a lot of surly and/or incompetent healthcare professionals during my family's many medical adventures, but I'm happy to let this narrator have his childlike moment of calm in a stressful situation.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Another vote to look at the concluding couplet David.

Delicate touch with the alien probing , I assume this was a package deal.

I had my Dunkirk a fortnight ago. The years do condemn lol.

[David Callin]

Thanks John. Glad you think so.

Thanks Tony. Glad you like it. Let me have a think about that twist.

Susan, sorry to hear about your personal experience - at a remove - of the NHS. My focus is not necessarily going to be the same as your focus, though. And mine may change. Certainly it's taken long enough to get to this point.

My idea here is not that each of the individual operatives are themselves motivated solely by love, but that Love - in a bureaucratic form - was (is?) the Prime Mover of the system in which they move. And I think that's true.

Thanks for looking in, Julie. I think you've got that about right.

Thanks, Jan. Good luck with your Dunkirk. That didn't end as badly as it could have. I wish the same for you.

Cheers all

David

[Alexandra Baez]

David, I enjoyed this poem and like your others on this theme, I’ll feel like I’m there. I’m just hoping you’ve been okay through all the scenarios described. It sounds like an ordeal!

The casting of the medics as benign aliens is interesting, funny, and apt, considering that MRI machine. I love the “deep cerulean blue,” the lovely irony of such a poetic term being applied to such a prosaic subject. And yet its cast of earnestness, shored up by following comments evidencing the n’s adoration and trust of the medics, is quite touching. I think it’s rather nice to see a poet unafraid to voice such elevated sentiments in this age of cynicism. Although I did wonder a bit about the emphatic-ness of “saints above” and their “moving principle” being “Love,” I was essentially okay with accepting this as the n’s experience. It’s true that love often moves in semi-disguise in this world, which I do believe is fundamentally propelled by love. The way that the sci-fi motif is expanded (contractedly) into the MRI machine and its otherworldly sense rings true in an adventurous kind of way.

It seems that your ellipses are meant to stand in in a loose way for some missing syllables. I myself have been chastised for using ellipses as stand-ins for syllables, but as a reader, I accept this approach pretty well. However, I’d accept it even better if the ellipses were used consistently to represent a specific number of syllables. In this instance, let’s see, this might be done by using them more sparingly, with each one serving as two syllables:

Breathe in, breathe out … and hold your breath—

continue breathing … planet Earth

or you could just fill in those syllables with words somehow and not have the ellipses count for any syllables, e.g.,

Breathe in … breathe out … breathe in now … hold your breath …

continue breathing deeply … planet Earth

Just fiddling around with possibilities here.

I like the way you break the poem in an uneven way, mid-rhyme, which captures the sense of breathlessness and being transported into another dimension. And the off-rhymes work well to convey a certain sense of tension.

Nice work. You've "got" me as a reader.

[David Callin]

Thank you very much for that, Alexandra. I'm delighted to know that you believe the world is fundamentally propelled by love. It's a belief that I try to cling to.

The ellipses sort of stand in in a loose way for some missing syllables, but I'm abandoning the syllabic gravity altogether there. This is the free-floating heart of this particular poem.

I'm very happy to have you as a reader.

Cheers

David

[Mary McLean]

Hi David,

I like it. Sorry I'm coming late to this but I wanted to share my unique perspective.

First, I'm the sister Susan mentioned and I don't recognize her description of the NHS. My father-in-law was not on a waiting list when he died -- on the contrary, the NHS had helped him survive about 25 years after his first heart attack and nearly 10 years after his second. And the only problems my husband experienced during his 18 months waiting for gallbladder surgery were a single short episode of pain passing a stone, and an inability to get travel insurance to visit America, where any sort of medical emergency would have cost us many thousands.

Second, I do MRI research for a living, so I know that tube very well from the inside and out. The BBC Archive recently released this wonderful clip of my PhD Supervisor (the one with the dark moustache) and his supervisor Peter Mansfield on Tomorrow's World in the 1970s: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Tomorrow%27s+world+MRI+BBC&mid=FE0C 699F1BE2EC23F872FE0C699F1BE2EC23F872&FORM=VIRE

I think the experience of having an MRI scan comes across very well in your poem, though I do wonder whether you could work in the noises in any way. Without them, I wasn't sure it wasn't CT. I think the breathing instructions with ellipses work fine, and I wouldn't want you to reword them for metrical purposes. 'TV set' threw me too, what about 'sci-fi drama set'? The simile to Star Trek is very apt -- Peter Mansfield's wife takes the credit for MRI because she turned to him while watching an episode where Bones was examining someone with his handheld device and said, 'Why don't you invent something like that?'

The last couplet does make me uncomfortable, for the sort of reasons others have mentioned. Personally I would vote for cutting it to give you room for more sensory evocation or sci-fi simile. The previous couplet is very strong, as is the poem overall.

[Susan McLean]

I want to apologize to Mary and other readers for the combination of misinformation (from a third party, not Mary) and misinterpretation that led to my previous statements about the NHS. I am glad to have the facts set straight. No one likes long waiting lists, but a health system that provides care for everyone, not just for those who can afford it, has obvious benefits compared to the system we have in the U.S.

Susan

[David Callin]

Mary, thank you very much for that. As you say, you have a unique perspective, and I thank you for sharing it with me.

Great to see that video. I remember Tomorrow's World very well. Fortunately it's a lot easier to get in and out of the thing nowadays. I don't think I'd have liked that approach. But that, as they say, was an experimental model.

I like your idea of working in the noises. I do remember them, but the vividness of the experience has faded a little now. How would you characterise them? I'm thinking of a humming, or a roaring, or something in between them. And were they intermittent, rather than continuous? I rather think they were, but I'm not sure now.

If I can incorporate the noises, in a new couplet, I can lose the offending couplet at the end. Although I still feel quite drawn towards that same rather starry-eyed conclusion.

So pleased that the Star Trek connection is apt. And I very much like Mrs. Mansfield's story. I like your whole post.

And, just to round things off nicely, the results came through today, via our local cardiologist. I think I can say I couldn't have hoped for better, so there's a feeling of some euphoria around here tonight. MRI is a marvellous invention.

Cheers!

David

[Mary McLean]

Great news on the scan report!
If you Google MRI scan noise recording or similar you will find a lot of youtube videos to refresh your memory. Definitely they are intermittent, usually changing every few minutes.