Aubade and Regression

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.