The speaker of this poem is a nurse who is recalling and
attempting to come to terms with a disturbing clinical encounter she’d had the
week before. (I should note at the
outset that there’s no indication in the poem as to whether the nurse is male
or female. I choose to think of her as
female). What had happened is that a
mother had brought her five-year-old son in for treatment, and the nurse’s exam
revealed that the child had second- and third-degree burns on his torso—in the
shape of a cross. The mother, weeping,
confessed that her boyfriend had, as a punishment, applied a cigarette to the
child’s body—while the mother had held her son.
Seeing the mother’s tears, the nurse considered offering the woman some
Kleenex, but could not bring herself to do so.
The child retrieved the box of Kleenex, then clung to his mother’s
skirt, and glowered at the nurse. Then
the nurse had participated with three others in prying the boy away from his
mother. In the present of the poem, a
week after the encounter, the nurse attempts to deal with the guilt and shame
she feels in her failure of professional decorum and compassion—at having
failed to rise above her moral judgment against the mother and offer the woman
basic human kindness and respect. In
confronting the chaos of her emotions, the nurse turns to a story she’d learned
in high school: the story of St. Lawrence.
The significance of her attempt to think with this story can be
overshadowed, for readers, by the intensity of the clinical encounter she
recalls; but her endeavor is of at least equal significance as the encounter.
