Richard M. Berlin, MD

"Too often summer days appear, Emblems of perfect happiness, I can't confront..."

"...and remember the white and bloodless world I knew before I fell in love."

"By the first of August, the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color..."

"...everything known and unknown for longer than I have searched or breathed, the infinity of my ignorance."

"The dark pours down, sticky as Coke, but the light from the kitchen gleams like a beacon."

"So many things look absurd from a distance that people still take seriously..."

"At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip..."

"She was clear-eyed and dying when I knew her, soft breaths feathering from her chest like distant smoke..."

"The Child is father of the Man..."

"It is not a place out there but a place in here. I catch on its barbed wire in both places."

"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."