Richard M. Berlin, MD

"I sit with my half-filled glass and a life we knew we were choosing..."

"But you who know all will never comprehend our resentment of perfection, the flawlessness you take for granted..."

"...this memory held on chest, in hand..."

"Scores of textbooks later we’re a pair of pagers and missed dinners, companions in sleep-deprived nights."

"I am not comforted by the morning after the night."

"We lower a plastic tray on his ribs as if food can stop the dying..."

"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..."

"Everyone thinks the brain is so complicated, but let’s look at the facts."

"We lower a plastic tray on his ribs as if food can stop the dying..."

"I had no expectation though of actually catching a fish when somehow we did."

"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."

"Life is short, though I keep this from my children."

"...my father’s spade saving last year’s mud, a long-tined rake, the swan-neck hoe..."

"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..."

Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches?

"I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once..."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals..."

"By year’s end, brittle with guilt, we hovered over our hollow creation..."

"Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."

"I remember perfumes and anxious sweat, who preferred the big leather chair and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner."

"This isn’t as easy as it seems..."

"There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless."

"I remember sitting like my patients when time expired, entire lives grasped in a 50 minute hour..."

"The dust of snow, From a hemlock tree, Has given my heart, A change of mood..."

"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..."