Have You Prayed?

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares Li-Young Lee's poem, "Have You Prayed?"

Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Chairman Mao. The family subsequently lived in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before settling in the United States in 1964 when Lee was seven. Years later, Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh where he studied with poet and professor Gerald Stern.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Freud on My Couch.