Poetry

"Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision. Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up. Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours, my doctor, day and night."

Here are some highlights from Frank A. Clark, MD’s, Poetry for Inclusion from throughout 2023, as seen in Psychiatric Times.

"...my eyes searching for the one skater in every crowd who glides graceful as a god, like my father years ago in his black leather racing skates..."

"This letter I write from the heavenly ashes wishing that ebony and ivory twirl as one into the arms of divine humanity."

"My black cat sprints through the kitchen door, a glassy-eyed cottontail hanging limp from his jaws."

"Walk through the garden's dormant splendor. Say only, thank you."

"You will love again the stranger who was your self."

How does one heal? Perhaps by "degrees of revealedness," according to a psychiatrist's reflections.

"Hat factories closed quiet as prayer books, and loss lingered in my father’s guts like unswept garbage after a big parade..."

A psychiatrist reflects on gratitude and Thanksgiving...

A psychiatrist reflects on how much we all have in common and the need for healing...

A poetic conversation among a Palestinian Israeli psychologist, an Italian Canadian psychiatrist, and a Canadian United Church Pastor in a time of war.

"Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite."

"It was a time when men wore fedoras banded on the crown, each band with a feather tucked into a bow, and inside, sweat bands carved from calf skins with their sweet smell of animal and earth."

"Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek)."

This book offers positivity via a unique form of poetry.

"I know I have the blood of survivors coursing through my veins; I know the lament of our loss must warm us again and again down in the belly of the whale..."

A psychiatrist reflects on the latest shootings.

"His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time."

"Oh for a stronger magic, that I could wave my arms and reach deep inside my white coat pocket..."

"The sounds of the world at this late hour sadden you, but then enters the rain, hastening down, the rain that wants to touch everything and almost does."

"My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams..."

A psychiatrist reflects on blue fortitude as he visits the Columbine Memorial.

"Oh for a stronger magic, that I could wave my arms and reach deep inside my white coat pocket, the mass vanished..."

"And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough..."

"What luck—an open bookstore up ahead..."

"For months she has dreamed in red..."

"Tornado or torbellino or something else, I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says that she was calling to ask me the same thing."

"As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood."

"Eyes locked on the flat-lined monitor, she hears the last drop gurgle, the team quiet and calm in a lake of blood."