11 Jan 2024

Mary
Ford Neal

New Moon

Jan 25th

Lux in
tenebris lucet

Dec 27th

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’.