Accounts of the Bedford Asylum

In the Bedford Archives

I studied a volume of accounts,

a time machine from 1850.

Photographs of forgotten residents

ogled me with sightless eyes

with scribed headings saying "Lunatic"

and it was quite unsuited not to feel

a disquiet espying these lost souls,

female Daguerreotype in silver and white

afflicted with "Hysteria"

and "Ferment", the accounts

denoting their furtherance (or absence thereof)

and not the tongue which the physicians now speak

so no unpronounceable words in Greek.

One thought she had known a physician

for over 60 years although a schoolgirl

and another convinced she was Napoleon,

some even confined for uterine derangement.

Oh, there were so many frightful tales

but all their troubles have wandered away,

I close the book...their accounts will remain.