Midwives

by George Gunn

The Dunbar maternity hospital stands lonely
behind its steeple-jump of sycamore trees
no-one is born there anymore
no young midwives walk its corridors
in their blue perfect uniforms
the kitsch Balmorality of the hospital tower
points to a heaven
empty of angels
now all mothers must go to Inverness
for the mystery & the pain

the sandstone walls turn yellow
in the rising morning light
the small windows like half-open mouths
hold still the generations of voices
which formed their first sounds
beneath the grey slate roof
my brother & I gurgled there
like two seal pups
on a Pentland skerry

on weekday afternoons the Dounreay dayshift
drives past into Atomic City
their cars their contradiction
& their curse
neat rows of new-built houses
drop down to the river
which flows on shining
in its Viking sail
the dayshift will park their BMW’s
outside their numbered nuclear doors

I run my finger across the index of my life
as I used to across the Dunbar’s iron railings
& in my mind’s eye I see
those maternity doors
swinging open 
& my mother stepping out 
with her pals & sister midwives
reassuring & chatty
these were the true deliverers
they held us all in their hands
their vigilance our guarantee
our breath their success
life & death on starched sheets
& polished linoleum floors

outside the main gate 
there is a large flagstone plaque
celebrating the dead 
English Queen’s diamond jubilee
two decades of Caithness rain
have rotted the wooden seating slats
so no-one can sit & contemplate the Empire
at least the weather is republican

down town in Top Joe’s & the Comm
on the TV lunchtime news
children are caried out
from bombarded hospitals
like wounded nativity dolls
such is the carnage of Gaza
where they will not break
or surrender or stop struggling
despite the thirty six kilogrammes
of high explosives for every
man woman & child in Palestine
provided by the US
their hospitals blasted to bits
ours silent & empty
like the stellar remnant
of a black dwarf

high above the clouds 
I hear the exhausted honking
of the first skeins of the wild geese
returning South from Iceland
their melancholic navigation
echoes off the Dunbar hospital
we could all be in outer space

across the vast rolling stolen country
players move towards & actors give
the real story of unloved hospitals
& the emptied regions
where money attempts to alter time
& the classic Highland view 
from the luxury hotel window
is valued more than people’s lives
as weak government caves in 
to the developers plan for division & injustice

the wild geese fly beyond the hospital tower
their musical democracy hangs in the air
the remembered voices of the midwives transform
a pibrochd from across the ocean
into the migrationary blood & feathers
of being born