Midnight

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.