Emily Fragos, Louise Glück, and “The Night Nurse” [Terence Winch]

 

In June of 2025, I found myself having to undergo two separate cardiac treatments at DC’s Washington Hospital Center, each visit spanning two days. Like most people, I hate being a hospital patient. The i.v.’s, the constant taking of vital signs day and night, the near-inedible food, the irritating roommate, the subarctic room temperature. Not to mention the pain and discomfort caused by whatever it is that has landed you there in the first place.

The nurses were the antidote to my hospital miseries. Without exception, they were extraordinarily kind, professional, attentive. One of my nurses was a young African-American guy, another was a young white guy; all the rest were young women of color. They were all amazing, none of them ever making me feel that I was a pest or a burden. When I was discharged, I left with a feeling of profound gratitude for these dedicated young people and their empathetic souls.

In the middle of the night—4.a.m., actually—on my second visit I buzzed for the nurse. My mouth was bone dry and I longed for a cup of crushed ice. The night nurse quickly appeared, heard my plea, and immediately re-appeared with the ice. Right then, I thought of a favorite poem of mine called “The Night Nurse,” by my friend Emily Fragos, the estimable New York poet. I found the poem on my phone and read it again, but this time in the most appropriate of circumstances. Great poems can transport you, take you out of yourself and into another dimension. And that was the effect of Emily’s poem that night.

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The Night Nurse22

The night nurse turns me in my bed and changes
the white sheets under me. They are wet, they are soiled,

and the night nurse washes my face and changes my gown.
I am clean and refreshed because of the night nurse.

The night nurse comes to me with a pill in a tiny cup.
I take the pill from her beautiful hands

and the night nurse takes away my pain, so that I may sleep
without plague of dream or fear of never waking.

The moon is out. The night nurse does not notice.
The night nurse only watches me. I am life and death

to the night nurse. I am more important to the night nurse
than the full pink moon over which the poets obsess.

The night nurse comes flying low over me like a silent drone.
The heart is beating peacefully like an upside-down bat,

the heart is racing like a Serengeti cheetah. The heart
must be listened to, beat by beat, minute by minute.

The night nurse knows my heart like no one else on earth.
The night nurse comes with a needle. I would cringe

with anyone else, but the night nurse slips the hypodermic
under my skin and into the blue vein, and I do not mind,

for I have given myself up. The night nurse
needs my blood and I gladly give her my blood.

[This poem first appeared in The New Yorker, 17 Oct 2022.]

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Later on, I emailed Emily to tell her that I was being well attended to by actual night nurses as well as by her wonderful poem. In her response, she told me, among other things, that the late Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2020, was also a fan of the poem. "When that poem appeared in The New Yorker," Emily says, “I received an exquisite fan letter from the great Louise Glück. I was floored. I went through my messy papers and found her letter, so I can partially quote her: ‘I so rarely get beyond the opening lines of New Yorker poems. But your poem! Absolutely riveting, absolutely unique. A kind of hopeless and impassioned nursery rhyme. It repays multiple readings. I feel I've only begun. ...You have been an inspiration to me. Your amazing poem about your sister is in the drawer of my bedside table. I have read it more times than I can count and never has it lost its mystery. Such a difference between art that is beautiful and art that is essential. ...In homage, Louise."

                                                          

I am impressed by Louise Glück’s supportive generosity to another poet. And I am very happy for Emily that she was the deserving recipient of such meaningful praise.  

On departure day, the discharge nurse arrived to bring me, via a streamlined wheelchair, to the discharge nurses’ lounge, where I would wait for my son to collect me and bring me home. On the elevator, I gave her a quick account of Emily’s poem and my middle-of-the-night email. She loved the story. Twenty minutes later, when my ride arrived, the nurse conveyed me to the hospital entrance, telling me on the way that she had found “The Night Nurse” online, had printed it out, and planned to frame it and hang it in the nurses’ lounge. Poesis omnia vincit!

 Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship from the Library of Congress. She is the author of four books of poetry: Little Savage, Hostage, Saint Torch, and Unrest (Sheep Meadow Press, 2021), and the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Art & Artists, The Dance, Music’s Spell, The Great Cat, Poems of Gratitude, Poems of Paris. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and magazines. She has also written numerous articles on music and dance for arts publications and served as guest poetry editor for Guernica. Emily Fragos has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU.

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Top image: Miss Nightingale, in the Hospital. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 24 February 1855, page 176.

Above: Portrait of a Nurse from the Red Cross (1915) was painted by the French artist Gabriel Nicolet (1856-1921) during World War I.

Photo of Emily Fragos by Dmitri Kasterine; photo of Louise Glück by Gasper Tringale.

This post originally appeared on the Best American Poetry blog, 18 July 2025.

©Terence Winch  
Permission required to use any of the contents of this post.