SPOTLIGHT -
The Morning After the Most Recent Shooting I Saw
"I am not comforted by the morning after the night."
Hospital Food
"We lower a plastic tray on his ribs as if food can stop the dying..."
"Spring"
"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..."
Geography of the Forehead
"Everyone thinks the brain is so complicated, but let’s look at the facts."
"Hospital Food"
The Bass
"I had no expectation though of actually catching a fish when somehow we did."
Overalls
"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."
Good Bones
"Life is short, though I keep this from my children."
Tools
"...my father’s spade saving last year’s mud, a long-tined rake, the swan-neck hoe..."
"Tools"
"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..."
Your Card Is the King of Rats
Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches?
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..."