Richard M. Berlin, MD

"...they’ve returned like songbirds, exhausted from flight but wild to swagger the songs they carry..."

"...so close that your emissions of carbon are mine, so close your sea rises with my heat.”

"...barriers that create space for healing placed close enough to hear everyone’s cries of longing and love..."

"Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things..."

"He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath..."

"...barriers that create space for healing placed close enough to hear everyone’s cries of longing and love..."

"...Love can't block a bullet, but neither can it be shot down..."

"And with one slow blink my reality shifts..."

".... I’m consigned to wait while the baby gets an injection..."

"...But tonight I’m twenty years and two hundred leagues from the sea, her painting suddenly a family portrait—weather-beaten me in the middle with worried-window-eyes..."

"I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul..."

"Back in the 70’s, before I knew my own voice, I listened to yours..."

"... when winds spread the word and brown fields bristle like dense fur down the back of the earth..."

"Forever you find your father in other faces..."

"Before I knew my own voice, I listened to yours while we learned our trades..."

"...They speak in poetry. Do they know I am there, listening?"

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."

"The warping night air having brought the boom, Of an owl's voice into her darkened room..."

"Write yourself scared the first day of med school, dying to cure the world..."

Being a poet isn't a 9 to 5 job.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.

"A fruit fly fell in my fine crystal glass, half full of five-dollar wine..."

"...Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist, and falling out of heaven like soft dew..."

"I’ve told these war stories for decades, made them tales of friendship, savvy, good luck, and brotherhood’s strength..."

"The moon drops one or two feathers into the field..."

A true war story is never about war...

"Until then, every forest had wolves in it..."

"I want a god as my accomplice..."

"...couples become capable of 'cognitive feats' beyond that of a single individual."

"She takes them gently from my hands, scrunches her brow, studies their loneliness..."