Poetry

Medical student Liz Irvin discusses how storytelling is integral to her ability to stay sensitive when it comes to medicine and education, and shares a poem about an experience she had caring for others before starting medical school.

"The season pivots and bends to the darkening north..."

"The headlines said Well-Loved American Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black."

“We’ll soon become the land, Of death on demand…”

"I say Good Morning! and he studies me in my white coat, like skin lesion he has seen only once in a textbook."

"After each lap around the circular hall the aides smile, Hello Doctor!"

"The national day had dawned."

"I am overtired, Of the great harvest I myself desired."

"...a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest..."

"I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage, though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors are supposed to stay dead."

"Einstein’s happiest moment occurred when he realized a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest..."

"...I swear to not be in a half-assed rush, wear helmet & ear guards, keep my gloves on for even a fast cut..."

Goes to the market Just to hear another voice: “Paper or plastic?”

"A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life, even though, even though this is my second heart..."

"One September morning, the day I started medical school, I placed a two-foot specimen in my sunny south window."

"...the heart-shaped ficus leaves dropping like sad notes from a Spanish song..."

"Poetry arrived in search of me."

"Back home, we glimpse our autumn faces in the hallway mirror."

"That’s when I started dreaming I could be a doctor someday, that I could get away, prescribe myself a new life."

A psychiatrist weighs in on the breaking news in Georgia, where there is yet another school shooting.

"But before offering it to us over steamed rice, even before his gods, he’d serve those who were not home..."

"We sit on a bench to find out how it will end..."

"While considering Celan's suicide, I think back to Virginia Woolf drowning herself..."

"But after we’ve met for the time it takes to smoke eight hundred packs of cigarettes, after all the medication trials, the damaged sighs and side effects, I wonder, Would Celan still drown himself in the River Seine?"

Finding social truth in poetic metaphors.

"So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post."

"The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars..."

"My own dear love, he is all my world,—And I wish I’d never met him."

Explore a poem about death, grief, and the healing powers of the humanities.

"I was talking on the phone, walking steadier, noticed the tap, and after, the tap-step, a light knock, a knock like someone’s at the door come to visit..."