Angel’s Wings
Sujata Bhatt
“I can recall that age
very well: fourteen-years-old,
when I thought I understood
Lenin and Mao… ”
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright restrictions)
VOCABULARY
Lenin, Mao, Christina Rossetti - see the context for info
Formaldehyde - a chemical used to preserve dead bodies and living tissue
Equidistant - exactly halfway between one thing and another
Autopsy - the act of examining a dead body in order to determine the cause of death
Festooned - chained with decorations, usually flower garlands or ribbons
Gossamer - a light, delicate material - also another name for cobwebs
Lungless - without lungs
STORY/SUMMARY
Stanza 1: I remember that age very well: fourteen, when I thought that I understood
communism and its leaders, and Christina Rossetti’s poetry was starting to sound silly
to me because it is quite regular and repetitive in an old fashioned sort of way.
Stanza 2: On a Saturday morning in April, after I’d been to my swimming lesson, I
stood in the corridor of a hospital, which smelled of formaldehyde, waiting for my
father. I spun around in a space that was half way between my father’s office and the
room where they examined dead bodies (the autopsy room).
, Stanza 3: My brother and I (he was eleven years old at the time) were together, but we
didn’t talk to each other or say anything for a quarter of an hour, as if the exercise of
swimming, and chemical exposure to chlorine, had changed the way we breathed and
stopped us from speaking.
Stanza 4: One of the heavy doors in the hospital corridor opened - and a dark man
with bright white hair asked us to step inside the room. He wanted us to see
something.
Stanza 5: The room was covered in rows of wings, all in a similar shape, all strangely
human-looking. I thought maybe they were fairies’ wings, or angels’ wings - made of
real spiderwebs.
Stanza 6: As we stepped closer to the wings, we could see clumps of cells - clusters
that looked like grapes, which were designed to open and expand when oxygen-filled
them up - but now they were shrivelled, next to rivers of blood that had turned black
from lack of air.
Stanza 7: They weren’t drawings or photos, they were real human lungs, well
preserved by somebody who was skilled in histology. The man could tell us, from
looking at the lungs, how old their owners had lived to be, and for how many years
each one of them had smoked. He told us everything except their names.
Stanza 8: Twenty pairs of lungs were pinned up on his wall: a collage of black and
grey, here and there were some other colours too - chalky yellow, and fungus-furred
green.
Stanza 9: How long did we stand there? And what did we say when we saw the
lungs? I don’t remember anything else about that day - what we ate for lunch or what
we did afterwards - the only thing I remember is those twenty pairs of nameless lungs,
the intimate spiderwebs that belonged to twenty people I never knew, all who were
now dead and lying without their lungs in their graves.
