Poem Of The Week: To Be Mindful (Type A+) By Emily Cotterill

To Be Mindful (Type A+)

Consider the unthreatening men of blood donation,
bobbing ‘round community centres and sports halls
on any given Tuesday. They dish out Club orange biscuits
and cheap squash in flimsy plastic cups, getting on
with institutional good. Notice machines that beep,
beep, pleasingly, cradles that rock with dark bags
of warm generous plasma. Feel the slow pressure-pull
of extraction against exposed skin on soft forearms.
See someone’s postman pricking their finger on the point
of an iron test. Look, a foam javelin has come loose
from the rafters, is sinking. Look, you are slumped
on the reclining couch, sugar-weak. And safe arms,
wrapped in well-worn uniform are rushing out to catch.

Emily Cotterill’s distinctly left-field view of a quotidian medical process adds immeasurably to her poem’s deeply satisfying received effect. Envisioned from an entirely detached perspective, the reader is encouraged to ‘consider’, or perhaps to re-consider, the unfolding, ritualised, procedure of a blood donation unit by examining preconceptions about volunteers, staff and donors.

Through the prism of metaphor and good humour – the poem bounces along in the airy lighthearted manner of an excessively helpful volunteer – the poet nails tableau and demeanour in the general benevolence of the moment, if not in the cut-price locators of ‘cheap squash’ and consolatory bounties of Club biscuits. We infer the warm infusion in the poem’s tone: the machines whose regular ‘beep’ reminds the captive audience of a continuing heartbeat, the ‘generous plasma’ whose dark bags rock gently in cradles, and the ‘unthreatening men’ whose cheery selflessness is a microcosm of the ‘institutional good’.

But most, the comfort that is vouchsafed by those who take the dispensing of care to be a duty, providing emollient for the suddenly ‘sugar-weak’. ‘Look’, the narrator intones, as everyman – elsewhere ‘someone’s postman’ – rushes to catch the newly anaemic and fainting donor.

‘To Be Mindful (Type A+)’ is taken from Significant Wow, published by Seren Books (2025), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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