Antidotes to Fear of Death

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Antidotes to Fear of Death," by Rebecca Elson. Elson is a Canadian-American poet and an observational astronomer studying globular clusters and stellar evolution born in 1960. She died in 1999. Her only poetry collection, A Responsibility to Awe, was published posthumously in 2001 and offers a glimpse into the intersections and relationships between her poetry and her science.

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.