Richard M. Berlin, MD

"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..."

"You know, now that anything can happen, it’s hard to know what will, and what will you do now that you know?"

"And then he stepped back, straightened his hat, let me sweat my own decision."

"The clock just ticked minute 41, and Annie, just as you predict, my attention is wandering, even if I haven’t hit Step 3: Make the reader feel something is at stake, which I’ll have to focus on in my revision."

"...My mother like a distantly spilled perfume."

"I am her book of poems and it is I."

"Always the light falls. Softly down on the hair of my belovèd."

“Step 1: put your butt in a chair for 45 minutes every day and get down a shitty draft.”

Here's a thank you note to all the musicians.

"Pain can't touch me no more, For I am free, I am free, I am free..."