This week in LearnEnglish poems...

The Great Bath Disaster

by Peter Wyllie

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This poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of its author. You can see more of Peter Wyllie's poetry on his website at http://www.proverse.co.uk/.

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Read the poem and then do an activity to see if you have understood it. Then do some writing yourself.

The Great Bath Disaster

The nurse said, "You're sweaty and smelly,
The odour is nasty and rank;
So let's get you down to the bathroom
And get you cleaned up in the tank.

The bath was a weird contraption
With strange looking tubes and a door;
It stood, like a Henry Moore sculpture
On a plinth bolted down to the floor.

She filled up the bath-well with water
And I eased myself into the seat.
Then with lots of squeaking and creaking
The bath tilted, lifting my feet.

I lay back; the water kept rising
'Til my bits were all covered in foam.
The nurse shouted "God! It is leaking,
I don't think the lever's pushed home."

We fiddled about with the door latch,
We gave it a pull and a push,
But the door gave a creak, and flew open
And the water poured out with a rush!

It ran like a stream through the bathroom
It splashed in a flood on the floor;
And then like the Bore in the Severn
It escaped to the ward, through the door.

In a flotsam of bedpans and boxes
The flood soon took over the ward.
The life rafts were brought out of the lockers
Where, for years, they had safely been stored.

Ducks flew in the windows and nested;
Steve Redgrave turned up with his oar.
An orchestra played in the background
A version of "Pull for the Shore".

It wasn't too long 'til the carnage
Was much worse than anyone feared.
Tony Blair "whistle-stopped" for a sound bite
And even Kate Winslet appeared

"Enough!" Cried the nurse; "This is crazy!"
She reached over and pulled out the plug
The floodwaters swirled down the drain hole
'Til the last drop slipped down with a glug

The ward very soon became normal
Except that the floors were quite clean,
And everyone said that it now looked
The shiniest that it had been.

The moral, in all of this story,
Is, if patients perspire and sweat
Then let them stay smelly and stinking
If you do not want to get wet.

Peter Wyllie
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