Richard M. Berlin, MD

"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."

"I scribble as if my father is beside me years and years ago, scoring whole-notes, white holes through rims of night."

"In the silence I could feel the air slip in and out of his lungs and the moment when the motion reversed, like a goldfish making the turn at the glass end of its tank..."

"I was a Jewish boy from the Jersey burbs raised on corned beef and Milano cookies. She was a Mennonite farmgirl whose father shot deer for dinner."

"The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like stop it."

"Patients get better, treatments end..."

"You feel in your bones the gray gravity of late August clouds..."

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."

"Patients get better, treatments end, openings appear in my schedule and I leave them open..."

"Moments like that, you can love this country..."

"We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle."

"If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness..."

"...Then twenty years swing by and I’m riffing chords on my father’s old D’Angelico, Grappelli’s photo clipped to the stand, an image captured the night he owned the ballroom stage, me on the dance floor..."

"I'm thinking about how good it is to have been sick, to have been turned inside out..."