Digging

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Digging" by Seamus Heaney. Heaney was a Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and professor, renowned for works of "lyrical beauty and ethical depth," often exploring themes of nature, family, politics, and the living past, all through the lens of his rural Irish upbringing. Born in 1939, Heaney published over 20 volumes of poetry, while also holding professorships at Harvard and Oxford and translating iconic works like Beowulf. He is remembered as a major 20th-century poet whose work combined a deep connection to the physical world with a profound awareness of human experience. He died in Dublin in 2013.

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.