🛑 System Failure: Poem: ‘Victa’ by E.M. Storm

Victa [after ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley] 

I was the captain of my ship 

 until the rain began to fall. 

 Don’t think the unrepentant drip 

 would spare your mind: it takes us all. 

They took the turtle from her shell 

 and laid her naked on a rock. 

 Delusions fell like brickwork fell: 

 they laid my neck upon the block. 

I was not master of my fate: 

 they took from me all my control. 

 They tied me to the mast to wait. 

 I was not captain of my soul. 

You were not well she said. 

I said I knew my mind: my right to die. 

They took my babies from their bed. 

I will not kill. I will not lie. 

My soul is mine to keep or give: 

to still the brackish lake, 

bereft of all that thirsted me to live. 

It is the one thing I have left.

By E.M. Storm – Collected Poems and Songs (1989-2024)

Ellen Margaret Storm is a paediatrician and the founder and director of U-Turn Health®. In 2014 she won first prize in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her poem ‘Out of Hospital Arrest’, and she was commended in 2013 and 2014 for ‘Artificial Rupture of Membranes’ and ‘Walk’.