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Poem Of The Week: Nurse at a Bus Stop By Simon Armitage

Nurse at a Bus Stop

The slow traffic takes a good long look.
Jilted bride of public transport,
alone in the shelter,
the fireproof bin and shatter-proof glass
scrawled with the cave-art of cocks and hearts.

It’s late, Friday, the graveyard shift, you’re ready
to dab blood from a split lip,
to hold the hand of cancer till the line goes flat.

Cardigan, sensible shoes, the kids
with a neighbour, fobwatch pinned
like a medal to your breast.

Winter sharpens the day.
The centuries crawl past,
none of them going your way.

Photo by Jaehyun Kim on Unsplash

Simon Armitage’s affecting panegyric was written before Covid but it might easily have been conceived in the wake of the epidemic. A hymn to selflessness in a world of increasingly ‘unstable coordinates’, as an overview of the collection from which the poem is taken has it, the ‘Nurse at a Bus Stop’ is a symbol of raddled integrity, of duty and humility.

The opening verse sets the scene: the nurse has been ‘jilted’ by public transport as passers-by in cars gawp like sheep at the lone figure in a bus shelter. Articles of municipal resistance to the worst proclivities of pointless vandalism, the ‘fireproof bin and shatter-proof glass’ are ironised by the (omni)presence of graffiti, ‘the cocks and hearts’ whose inane commentary is as far removed from a sense of the poem’s deeper articulation as the ‘Cock and balls’ of Larkin’s ‘Prestatyn’ are from the nature of cancer. And yet they remain integral signifiers of our age.

And like Larkin, Armitage coaxes deeper meaning from the observed ordinary, making of the ‘Cardigan’ and ‘sensible shoes’ metonyms for commitment to an ideal whose demands overwhelm the perceived rewards: the nurse who is ready to tend the dying cancer patient and the drunk with a ‘split lip’ is obliged to leave ‘the kids / with a neighbour’, foregoing one duty of care for another in an impossible compromise. The solid trochees of Armitage’s second tercet – ‘like a medal to your breast’ – reinforce that sense of respect, invoking figurative recompense for those who quietly serve.

The poem's resonant final lines toll an uphill individual struggle as the nurse, seemingly out of step with time’s capricious tempo, is cast in measures of public indifference.

‘Nurse at a Bus Stop’ is taken from The Unaccompanied, published by Faber & Faber (2017)

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