These days, the Preferred Place of Care
(or PPC) according to academics
is The Home or The Hospice.
Dad prefers to ignore
the finality of words
and officiates from Bed 6 on Ward 11E
summoning us
with parting gifts
as we gather
in comfy chairs provided
by the Project Coordinator for the Patient Pathway (or Matron)
and Betty, the cleaner.
He doesn’t want to go home.
He refuses the sweetened pleas of bed managers
to go home. This is home.
Contained by the, at last, certainty
of the rhythmic swish of the morphine pump
and ward rounds.
He swears the profile of a golden lioness
rises glowering from the trees
overlooking The Heath
and the paths where we handfed
Nuthatches, Chaffinches and Robins.
Fewer of them now.
He is more tired today.
I feed him slow spoonfuls
of leek and potato soup
tell him that Samuel
went to the zoo yesterday
held out his hand to touch
the Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus
almost wiped out by civil war.
That Adam wants to bring it home.