Poetry

"One September morning, the day I started medical school, I placed a two-foot specimen in my sunny south window."

"...the heart-shaped ficus leaves dropping like sad notes from a Spanish song..."

"Poetry arrived in search of me."

"Back home, we glimpse our autumn faces in the hallway mirror."

"That’s when I started dreaming I could be a doctor someday, that I could get away, prescribe myself a new life."

A psychiatrist weighs in on the breaking news in Georgia, where there is yet another school shooting.

"But before offering it to us over steamed rice, even before his gods, he’d serve those who were not home..."

"We sit on a bench to find out how it will end..."

"While considering Celan's suicide, I think back to Virginia Woolf drowning herself..."

"But after we’ve met for the time it takes to smoke eight hundred packs of cigarettes, after all the medication trials, the damaged sighs and side effects, I wonder, Would Celan still drown himself in the River Seine?"

Finding social truth in poetic metaphors.

"So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post."

"The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars..."

"My own dear love, he is all my world,—And I wish I’d never met him."

Explore a poem about death, grief, and the healing powers of the humanities.

"I was talking on the phone, walking steadier, noticed the tap, and after, the tap-step, a light knock, a knock like someone’s at the door come to visit..."

"...the beauty still intoxicating, the spirit of the research like a child swimming for the first time in the sea, awed..."

"By now I’ve lost track of time with this boy who reminds me of myself when I imagined becoming a doctor..."

"Remember? Remember wanting to play every minute, as if that was why we were born?"

"How free is our will if our fate is decided by our melanin. What is the meaning of Black lives when so many people don’t think we matter?"

"Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin..."

"...when skilled hands and callused fingertips pick sweet equations where practice becomes song."

"Hear the story of wood, cut and stained and carved for someone’s need."

"Touched by the hard times, flowers shed tears. Grieved by separations, birds are startled in their hearts."

A psychiatrist reflects and laments on the state of the country.

"Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes, Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."

"...yet all the passengers filed out saying, “Thank you! We didn’t know a doctor would still help in an emergency.” But I was like the heroes on the evening news declaring, “No big deal. Just doing my job,” and meaning it..."

"The night is swallowing Daylight. We sit down to eat."

"The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing, For thy delight each May morning. If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my Love."

“The wind has donned your hair...