ELIZABETH SMITHER’s most recent collection of poems, The Year of Adverbs was published this year by AUP. A new collection of stories, The Girl who Proposed will be published by Cape Catley in March 2008.


       All Saints and the day of an operation

       By midnight, All Souls, you will be sleeping
       the sleep of the drugged, wake in a grey light
       and wonder where you are, touch your wound
       think the bed lamp is a moon. Above

       where no eye can see the saints
       have done their handover like a shift
       of nursing staff. Supremely confident
       white-winged, white-coated who

       on earth were often strained and queer,
       devout in ways that lead to awful consequence
       which now they float free from: extreme
       to extreme reward. All Souls brings

       your breakfast on a tray, the human scope.
       Your wound will be dressed, you sit up
       marvelling at the ordinary, the complete
       that cannot be removed by surgery.