Richard M. Berlin, MD

"I remember the first time my fingers burrowed the swamp where belly joins leg to feel an artery throb..."

"The end of the world was mistaken for just another midday massacre in America. Brain matter and broken glass, blurred boot prints in pools of blood..."

"But when I finally learned to feel everything, I became a psychiatrist who touches nothing but a patient’s hand at the first meeting and the final good bye..."

"Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars..."

"When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down..."

"Give us this day our dividends in cash and fixed stock options as we outperform all coders against us..."

"I read your poetry like a hiker on a treacherous trail who finally stops to rest and drink and admire the view of snow-capped peaks..."

"Without a father to guide me north, your poems were a compass pointing toward a world where doctors can be poets..."

"...we are saying thank you faster and faster, with nobody listening we are saying thank you..."

"I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough."

"Do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments?" "I said not yet but I intend to start today."

"...and my brother sprawled on the carpet singing me to sleep, the song our grandmother sang to our mother under the olive trees in the mist of her stories..."

"They toil in a sterile field, pack produce on ice fast as death’s freedom allows..."

"He stands like a farmer with hired hands, ready to begin the reaping..."

"My nephew, may his wildest dreams come true, confronted by his parents with his teenage grades shot back, Those are not my grades; immediate, definitive, assured."

"I want to jog down to the river & make it my bed—I want to walk its muddy banks & make me a withdrawal..."

"And then I understood everything..."

"What they taught in school was not what we needed, and what we needed (they said) could not be conveyed."

"This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost."

"What they taught in school was not what we needed, and what we needed (they said) could not be conveyed..."

"childhood remembrances are always a drag if you’re Black..."

"I found him on the porch that morning, sipping cold coffee, watching a crow..."

"Tonight their eyes meet with the spirit of sacred music, her body held between his legs like a cello, one hand stroking her neck, his arm curled around her waist."

"Tonight their eyes meet with the spirit of sacred music..."

"Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies, tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song."

"My sons, daughters, young lovers and friends. I don’t know them."

"What we did to the trees, what we did to the earth, we did to our sons, to our daughters..."

"Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise..."

"He slaps a chest film on the light box and hooks a bleary intern: Tell me, doctor, what is the shape of this child’s ears?"

"Fifteen seconds, thirty, a minute of silence, sweat weeps from the intern’s forehead..."