Richard M. Berlin, MD

"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..."

"You think you’re too small to make a difference?"

"And when she allows our eyes to meet my joy from her gift pleases her more than I can understand on this birthday she loved to call my first day of medical school."

"...I would take you and take you and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted."

"Lost in the anatomy of wonder, moments pass before I catch my mother’s smile while she pretends to dust her shelves..."

"In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain..."

What is the first thing you share with your patient when you are about to prescribe a new medication?

"I love you as one loves the sickest patient: terminally, between the diagnosis and the death."

"...the fresh cut grass a living carpet where all of us lay down and dream death will come to everyone except me."

"We call them The Not Dead when they crumple in an easy chair after chemo..."

"O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season."

"She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping..."

"...you are the air of the now and gone..."

"And we laughed again because he made us feel safe and loved, even when we stumbled, his calculated goal to teach us how to solve for X when X equals kindness."

There are only three kinds of people in the world, those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

"And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make a bridge..."

"...well, today is just that kind of day."

"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own."

"My mind screams, Sociopath! Liar! but I know he’s gone..."

How important is it to understand a person’s ethnicity and cultural norms when developing a treatment plan?

"All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn..."

"...we came in peace for all mankind. Then returned to continue the war."

The Gerald F. Berlin Creative Writing Award is rewarding future doctors and poets alike.

"To what purpose, April, do you return again?"

"When I was nineteen and still had time, I worked college breaks in my father’s factory, and let sweet leather’s smell soak into my skin..."