Poetry

Reflections through poetry after a moving visit...

"You feel in your bones the gray gravity of late August clouds..."

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."

A Halloween reflection on stigma...

Reflections on the bounty of life...

A psychiatrist reflects on trauma, healing, and growth...

"Patients get better, treatments end, openings appear in my schedule and I leave them open..."

"Moments like that, you can love this country..."

"We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle."

On this September 11th—and always—we strive for unity...

"If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness..."

A psychiatrist reflects on decisions...

"...Then twenty years swing by and I’m riffing chords on my father’s old D’Angelico, Grappelli’s photo clipped to the stand, an image captured the night he owned the ballroom stage, me on the dance floor..."

“Summer, like the body, bends slowly toward its end…”

"I'm thinking about how good it is to have been sick, to have been turned inside out..."

"You think you’re too small to make a difference?"

"And when she allows our eyes to meet my joy from her gift pleases her more than I can understand on this birthday she loved to call my first day of medical school."

"...I would take you and take you and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted."

"Lost in the anatomy of wonder, moments pass before I catch my mother’s smile while she pretends to dust her shelves..."

One psychiatrist shares some words of wisdom for the class of 2022.

"In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain..."

A psychiatrist shares his reflections on inclusivity... and making room for all.

"I love you as one loves the sickest patient: terminally, between the diagnosis and the death."

A physician living with mental illness shares their experience through poetry.

Reflections on the new suicide hotline...

"...the fresh cut grass a living carpet where all of us lay down and dream death will come to everyone except me."

A psychiatrist reflects on the past, present, and future for BIPOC MDs and DOs.

"We call them The Not Dead when they crumple in an easy chair after chemo..."

"O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season."