SPOTLIGHT -
A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me
"I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once..."
Preface to Leaves of Grass
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals..."
Anatomy Lab
"By year’s end, brittle with guilt, we hovered over our hollow creation..."
Invictus
"Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."
What a Psychiatrist Remembers...
"I remember perfumes and anxious sweat, who preferred the big leather chair and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner."
A Quiet Life
"This isn’t as easy as it seems..."
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
"There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless."
"What a Psychiatrist Remembers"
"I remember sitting like my patients when time expired, entire lives grasped in a 50 minute hour..."
Dust of Snow
"The dust of snow, From a hemlock tree, Has given my heart, A change of mood..."
"Anatomy Lab"
I Wish I Held My Father’s Hand
"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..."
Ideas of Heaven
"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."
25 Years of Poetry of the Times
Celebrating 25 years of Poetry of the Times with Richard Berlin, MD!
If You Ask Me My Name
"And if you like it simple, doctor will do."
Paper-White Narcissus
"There is no greater loneliness..."
“If You Ask Me My Name”
Welcome to 2023, the 25th year of Poetry of the Times with Richard Berlin, MD!
An American Sunrise
"We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves..."
The Tailors of Children’s Memorial
"It is Christmas eve and our patient lies on the table in twilight sleep..."
Celebration: Birth of a Colt
"We wait, our bare feet dangling in the horse trough..."
Messenger
"My work is loving the world..."
On Transience
"Behind his couch, Freud senses summer’s return, draws a puff, flicks the ash, smiles as he studies his undying ember."
The Great Fires
"Love is apart from all things. Desire and excitement are nothing beside it."
"On Transience"
"For no particular reason I lift my dusty volume of Freud’s Standard Edition from a shelf..."
I Am Bound for de Kingdom
"Look out for me I’m a-coming too..."
Chemistry Lesson
"...her steady green eyes and naked display of farmgirl skill the chemistry that bonded us for life."
Aubade and Regression
"I scribble as if my father is beside me years and years ago, scoring whole-notes, white holes through rims of night."
Phone Therapy
"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..."
"Chemistry Lesson"
"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."
Your Brain Is Not a Prison!
"The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like stop it."
Contemplating Retirement
"Patients get better, treatments end..."