Modern Medieval Artist
"While I watch the artist paint, I imagine him in the time of plague..."
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POETRY OF THE TIMES
-Venice, Italy, 2011
While I watch the artist paint
I imagine him in the time of plague
crafting a portrait of a Medico della Peste,
a Plague Doctor wearing an ibis-like
mask, eyes shielded by crystal discs,
curved beak filled with sweet-smelling
amber, cloves, rose petals and myrrh
to drown the stench, his waxed black cloak
shielding legs from buboes weeping
pus, a wooden cane to poke patients
for signs of life. Fruit sellers and
tradesmen wore the mask for a few
ducats a day, but never read the Canon
of Avicenna, medieval medicine’s
modern textbook, a Persian man’s
million word treatise from the Golden
Age of Islam when Jews and Christians
and Muslims shared meals of lentils
and lamb, dying young whichever god
they worshipped. And I wonder if today’s
artist had proclaimed God’s splendor
in the holiness of Avicenna’s turban
and robe, would the Inquisition have seen
only blasphemy, burned him at the stake,
burned the portrait, burned the treasure
he held out to the world like an offering?
Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 23 years in Psychiatric TimesTM in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. ❒
