Joy To The Cuckoo’s Nest

Speech is silver, silence is golden.
The walls are white and untouched, reeking of perfection.
Everything is silent, the patients and their golden teeth.
They are either staring or sleeping; we have gone unnoticed.

How do they live in such silence? Their voices must be too pure.
Even the air-conditioner is a silent, passing wind
In the still-life. The paintings are all the same – they are of grassy hillsides
That do not dance. Everyone seems to love stillness.

How disturbed they must be at our audacity – if they are angry
They do not show it. We are merely carollers, but armed nonetheless.
Hark, hark, our sweet silver bells, how they ring like gunshots,
And our voices that sound out, they are only silver.

We are still unnoticed. The whiteness of the walls is more appealing –
It must be the blankness. Only the nurses are clapping.
Our Joy To The World is not understood, it is not pure.
The only purity is silence, silent like a midnight manger.

This is isolation, with locked doors and windows. I am not used
To such a life. The only familiarity is a golden sunrise.
It is ineffable; we must remain silent to enjoy it.
Chaos seems so distant here, the only virtue known is silence.

a/n: I went carolling with my church choir last December, and among the places we carolled at was a mental ward (Adam Road Hospital) – colloquially known as a 'cuckoo's nest'. (You might, of course, remember the novel/film One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.) This poem is thus purely based on observation, and no offence is intended towards any mental patients, or friends/relatives of such.