After Reading Music from Apartment 8

-for John Stone, M.D.

When I started out in medicine,

before I married and before

I had written a single poem,

I read your poetry like a hiker

on a treacherous trail who finally

stops to rest and drink and admire

the view of snow-capped peaks.

Three decades later I imagine you,

ten years younger than my father

would be if bad genes, bad luck, and bad

doctoring hadn’t killed him long ago.

Without a father to guide me north,

your poems were a compass

pointing toward a world

where doctors can be poets,

where the pulse of each line

begins with the heartbeat we hear

when we bend close to our patients.

I pray you, too, are drinking deep

from whatever stream brings you

to your knees. And I hope

you can hear my boots striding

behind yours, cracked from the heat,

covered with dust, both soles still strong.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.