Richard M. Berlin, MD

"Migrants pay for safety. We pay people to believe that what we tell them is true, especially when we have spared them the hardest facts to hold."

"Life is short, though I keep this from my children."

"...my father’s spade saving last year’s mud, a long-tined rake, the swan-neck hoe..."

"Each spring, when earth warms and begs me to open its dark skin, I carry them past flowering apples and pears to the quiet square of garden..."

Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches?

"I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once..."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals..."

"By year’s end, brittle with guilt, we hovered over our hollow creation..."

"Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."

"I remember perfumes and anxious sweat, who preferred the big leather chair and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner."

"This isn’t as easy as it seems..."

"There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless."

"I remember sitting like my patients when time expired, entire lives grasped in a 50 minute hour..."

"The dust of snow, From a hemlock tree, Has given my heart, A change of mood..."

"By year’s end, brittle with guilt, we hovered over our hollow creation..."

"I wish I could have caught his eye, delivered the silent message that I understood what he had to go through every day to keep the peace..."

"My mother’s idea of heaven was a pulse, nurses in white spilling light across fields with hurricane lamps, bandage rolls, syringes, pain killers, stethoscopes, pressure cuffs, patella hammers."

Celebrating 25 years of Poetry of the Times with Richard Berlin, MD!

"And if you like it simple, doctor will do."

"There is no greater loneliness..."

Welcome to 2023, the 25th year of Poetry of the Times with Richard Berlin, MD!

"We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves..."

"It is Christmas eve and our patient lies on the table in twilight sleep..."

"We wait, our bare feet dangling in the horse trough..."

"My work is loving the world..."

"Behind his couch, Freud senses summer’s return, draws a puff, flicks the ash, smiles as he studies his undying ember."

"Love is apart from all things. Desire and excitement are nothing beside it."

"For no particular reason I lift my dusty volume of Freud’s Standard Edition from a shelf..."

"Look out for me I’m a-coming too..."

"...her steady green eyes and naked display of farmgirl skill the chemistry that bonded us for life."