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 | Lancashire Times Weekend Edition |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
1:05 AM 15th November 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: The Day Room (I) By Kit Wright
The Day Room (I)
From Kendal Ward, Rainhill Mental Hospital
Many are non-plussed
By the unexpected behaviour of their clothes
And have mislaid forever
The art of wearing the face.
Gums wedged tight or mouths
Locked open in a scream that travels inward
Homelessly:
Here we all are on your holy mountain.
It’s a little bit nippy up here on the mountain
For some are shivering, never
Stop shivering, also
Unseasonably warm. That man
Is caked with lava, head to hip.
By the unexpected behaviour of their clothes
And have mislaid forever
The art of wearing the face.
Gums wedged tight or mouths
Locked open in a scream that travels inward
Homelessly:
Here we all are on your holy mountain.
It’s a little bit nippy up here on the mountain
For some are shivering, never
Stop shivering, also
Unseasonably warm. That man
Is caked with lava, head to hip.
Image by Catherine from Pixabay
In moments of clarity and insight, the narrator/observer nails the visible dishevelment and disinhibition of the patients’ physical appearance as authentically as Larkin’s rendering of a hospital in ‘The Building’, whose denizens are numbed to obedience by the banal apparatus of prognosis. Wright’s patients are ‘non-plussed’, surprised at the recalcitrance of clothing and demeanour; still others are transfixed in the rictus of silent screams as terrifyingly resistless as figures in a Francis Bacon canvas.
The point at which the narrator is abandoned to the oxymoronic disturbance of hallucination – the relentless shivering and the vision of a man 'caked with lava' - is also the point at which the process of identification is most intuitively served.