A difficult task

American Life in Poetry

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S.C. Hahn is an American poet now living in Stockholm where, as you’ll see, it can be every bit as hard to get out of bed after an operation as it is here. You can hear the machinery creaking, can’t you?

Getting Out of Bed After Surgery

This site has no industrial crane that swings

an arm around and lowers it to receive 

a load to raise – pallets of bricks for a wall

or rods of steel rebar that will arc

in a bridge high over a river: here is only

a bed, the low hill of a sheet, and an older 

man whose gears, stiff with disuse, are leveraging

his body, first untucking the legs to lower

them down to the floor, then bracing the beam

of a left arm against the mattress, the right hand

gripping a bed rail, and then the engine of pain

turns the whole contraption of bone and flesh

into a slow motion, up in increments

like a demolition film that’s run in reverse

until a newer center of gravity is reached,

and the laws of physics require that whatever is down

must rise to meet a life that stands waiting.