When I learned my first scale at 45 I knew I would never rip loose and free like the pros who started as teenagers, when time didn’t matter and practicing was just another form of play.
We do not have to set time aside to do something that helps validate our experience, while simultaneously coping with it. The lesson expressed in this psychiatry resident's poem.
The frayed dignity of the patient described in this poem, his intelligence matched by the inexplicable intransigence of his alcoholism, moved this VA psychiatrist to describe the clinical encounter, apropos for April, Alcohol Awareness Month.
In the process of both psychotherapy and sculpture, this psychiatrist discovered there is potential for an exciting and rewarding life. Here, a representative piece from his collection.
When a full-time writer's husband was diagnosed with cancer, she found writing poetry helped her cope. She guessed that others would, like her, find their experiences with cancer best expressed through poetry. So began The Cancer Poetry Project.
—for SusanneWe kneeled on the bookstore floortwo students scanning the bodiesof new books, checking outeach other's Principlesof Internal Medicine.Scores of textbooks laterwe're a pair of pagers and missed dinners,companions in sleep-deprived nights.We suffered the long delaybefore our only child while we ranto slashed wrists and ODs,sprinted from half-read journalto school play to board meeting.In conversation long as summer lightwe talked patients and drugs,recited the simple prayers of dying,learned how we both took medicineas a life-long lover.One hushed June evening in mid-lifescented rose and thick with fire-flies,the phone steals her.I sit with my half-filled glass
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