Hamish Todd's "Still Here" begins in a nightmare and only slowly admits that it is a hospital appointment. The speaker is lying inside an MRI scanner, having gone deaf in the left ear, while doctors rule out a tumour. The central idea is that fear and loss can be lived with, and even joked about, once a person adapts and counts what remains. The title works two ways. "Still" describes the enforced stillness of the scan, and it also means "continuing to exist."
The poem withholds the word "MRI" until well into the fourth stanza, so the opening reads as a burial. The speaker is "Entombed," "Buried alive," in a space like a "coffin" with a lid that might "collapse." The first image, "a tulip bulb / Rolled up with no way out," is curled and buried. A bulb is also something that survives underground, so the simile may quietly hold a hope the speaker cannot yet feel. That is an inference, but the poem's ending supports it. The machine's noise, "a racket / Like world's end," turns a medical routine into catastrophe, and the hard plastic mask, the pinned arms and the "scant oxygen" make the reader share the panic. The speaker's reasoning about panic is almost comic in its logic: panicking will use up the air, so "I will accelerate my own demise." The formal phrase shows a mind clinging to calculation to stay calm.
The form matches this. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, only short lines in uneven stanzas that sound like speech. Line breaks do much of the work. "And if that / Weren't bad enough" pauses on the hinge of the phrase, as a person might in a wry aside, and the lines get shorter and more clipped as the panic builds. The strangest image is the tube "inserted… / Like the cork of a bottle," which "is looking deep into my brain / Bubbles suspended in glass." The machine does the looking, so the speaker becomes an object being examined. The bubbles in glass could be the scan images or the speaker himself, fragile and held in place. The poem leaves that open.
Then comes "All because," which deflates the drama. The cause is ordinary: one deaf ear and a cautious doctor. After that the tone loosens, and so does the sound. "I've grown used to it now" is flat and unshowy, and soon the poem allows itself a rhyme, "Get around, make sound." The repeated verb "make" drives the list "breakfast… whoopie… dinner… friends." "Whoopie" is a cheeky, old-fashioned word dropped between meals, and it shows humour being used as a way of coping. The list also moves from private routine to company, so gratitude turns into a picture of a full life.
The Beatles ending does the most with the least. The speaker hears "stereophonic harmonies / In old-fashioned mono," so hearing loss becomes a joke about outdated technology, as if his ear had turned into a vintage record player. He then recalls "The Fool on the Hill," a Beatles song about a solitary watcher, and says he feels "a little like" him. The line "Earlier than ever now" admits that time is passing and age is near, without self-pity. The last line, "the world still spinning round," answers the "world's end" of the opening. The racket that seemed to announce the end has been replaced by quiet continuation.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is that it never tells us what the scan found. Its subject is how the speaker lives with uncertainty, not the medical result. It is also honest about fear, with the panic button under the finger, while refusing to let fear have the last word. The vocabulary is everyday and the humour is gentle, yet the structure moves from entombment to open air in a few short stanzas. For students it is a useful example of how plain language, well-placed line breaks and one well-chosen cultural reference can carry a serious feeling without grand statements.