Poetry

In the graph, bands of color recede like mountain silhouettes drawn by a child...

I never take calls when I'm with a patient, except today when the phone rings from Boston-liver mets on his scan, biopsy tomorrow...

After all the encores at Tanglewood, the only music left is September’s song of crickets scraping their legs for mates...

The sharp steel wall of the concert hall encloses the melody and wounds the summer sky, a soft yellow glow gathering before moonrise...

Outside, the bluestone patio warmed my bare feet, and I smelled Casablanca lilies and honeysuckle we planted last spring.

Before I knew much psychiatry I met his angry stare in the ER, a homeless man with a three day beard...

We climbed concrete ramps from the subway’s underground world, up to the grandstand and my first vision of heaven...

spring-time territory, raucous and free as a New Orleans . . . trumpet, my patient locked-in to the wild tune

But old colleagues said . . . the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart, . . . a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms

I pictured him at his waiting room door . . . clutching a chart, catching eyes, . . . calling out a name, bewildered

Here's to the lovely trees of Jersey, my home . . . town streets lined with linden and larch, . . . poplar and elm, flowered locusts scenting

I'm reviewing a left ventriculography from a man with chest pain, MI ruled out, his wife dead for a post-crash hour...

Einstein's happiest moment revealed.

Needle sticks and night call, Hep B burrowing skin, bad smells, deep wounds, death, dying, dead wood...

Two yellow feathers and a skull. . . drop from the sky and fall on the brown . . . scar of trail, a sharp-shinned hawk

Each wound speaks its own language.

A poetry reading by psychiatrist Richard Berlin, MD.

Our identity as physicians is the foundation for our careers as psychiatrists and the first step in our transition from layperson to doctor takes place in the anatomy lab.

Listen to Richard Berlin, MD, recite one of his poems.

Wild Night, after the cops came to shut the music down, after friends and family were headlights pointed toward home...

"Einstein’s happiest moment...occurred when he realized...a falling man falling...beside a falling apple..."

AUDIO A good apple pie fixes every pain. Your grandmother baked them to be sure you’d know- Cinnamon for heartbreak, cloves for shame . . .

Today when the ground was no longer...

Poetry of the Times--Good Fathers.

Poetry of the Times Our Medical Marriage

We waited for the broken and the burned.

If You Ask Me My Name - Poetry of the Times

Hospital Food - Poetry of the Times

PTSD - Poetry of the Times