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11 Jan 2024
Mary
Ford Neal
New Moon
Jan 25th
Dec 27th
Lux in
tenebris lucet
After Three Oncologists
(Professor RJ Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri
and Professor Sir David P Lane of the Department of Surgery
and Molecular Oncology, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee)
by Ken Currie
The first says
It is cold here.
It is not dark, but
the light is green and strange.
Perhaps it is dark, and we are owls—
we do not remember.
The second says
Perhaps it is dark, and we are moles
groping our way
through wipe-clean tunnels, surfacing
in wipe-clean rooms.
Where is the earth?
Where are the roots?
The third says
I am not an owl. I am not a mole.
I was a child once.
There were schooldays and holidays
and birthday parties
but that’s all forgotten now.
The first says
Are these our hands?
What have we been doing with them?
The only sounds here
are machine-cold. Contraptions hum
and whir and beep, but all the humans
are quiet. It is cold here.
It is not dark.
The second says
I was always a clever boy.
Only the cleverest boys were allowed
to become what we have become.
Owls, or moles
sent into the darkness
to bring the others back.
The third says
I am not an owl, or a mole.
Look at the evidence—it is not dark here.
I was a boy, and now
I am a candle.
Lux in tenebris lucet.
Behind the poem...
This poem responds to Ken Currie’s painting Three Oncologists, which hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. In Currie’s painting, the subjects appear as beings simultaneously liminal, vulnerable, and supernatural. I chose to place the three characters ‘in conversation’ in my poem, yet each is ultimately alone in this moment of exposure. Currie has said his approach was inspired by one of the subjects remarking that people see cancer as darkness, and it’s the oncologist’s job to go in and retrieve them from that darkness. My poem’s title (and its final line) means, ‘light shines in darkness’.