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"My black cat sprints through the kitchen door, a glassy-eyed cottontail hanging limp from his jaws."
Any Good Poem
Richard Berlin, MD, shares Gail Mazur's poem "Midnight."
Midnight
––Cambridge, 2023
My black cat sprints through the kitchen door,
a glassy-eyed cottontail hanging limp from his jaws.
—I dread feeling the last flutter of a rabbit’s heart,
but Bogey wants praise, his city nights peopled
with coyotes, turkeys, rabid raccoons—and bats
high in the sky, silhouetting against the moon.
I can’t translate the coyotes’ howl, their language
of passions, soundtrack of sinister cartoons
but I’ve become calm, so I grab today’s Times
to wrap this plush creature, so still, so warm,
so unruffled, so cute, a little calamity lolling here,
its front paws curled, its blood a haiku trickle
on the front page across Kyiv’s ravaged news.
Looking peaceful at being dead, done with dying.
–Gail Mazur
Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 25 years in Psychiatric Times® in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Freud on My Couch.
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