Poetry

"In the silence I could feel the air slip in and out of his lungs and the moment when the motion reversed, like a goldfish making the turn at the glass end of its tank..."

A fourth-year medical student reflects on leaving medical and entering residency—and all the patients who impacted their life.

"I was a Jewish boy from the Jersey burbs raised on corned beef and Milano cookies. She was a Mennonite farmgirl whose father shot deer for dinner."

A psychiatrist reflects on the fears resulting from real life experiences...

"The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like stop it."

“Things change. People come and go. You quietly remain…”

"Patients get better, treatments end..."

Celebrating and honoring Black Poetry Day...

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..."