Aubade and Regression

Video

"I scribble as if my father is beside me years and years ago, scoring whole-notes, white holes through rims of night."

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares David Giannini's poem, "Aubade and Regression."

Aubade and Regression

Fey light, a pen, its ink into the thin

paper half in white / half shadowed on


this desk with my father’s hinged lid

sometimes lifted for him to score


music even when his wits slipped—outside:

thick gray light, blackish, breaking


morning decades beyond his death, and I

want to reach through and higher, to be shot


with sunlight—I write to annoy fog,

I scribble as if my father is beside me


years and years ago, scoring whole-notes,

white holes through rims of night.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 24 years inPsychiatric Times™ the “Poetry of the Times” column. He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Freud on My Couch. 

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