Poetry

Our daughter’s first day of Med School ten years ago, computer charged, a career choice . . .

I imagine Emma on a winter night, an eight-year-old curled fireside in a wing chair, proving her skill with weeping willows...

What is more concerning? The voices in his head or not being able to decipher them without a hearing aid?

They sulk and swear when I say, “Sorry, no Jollies,” tune out when I lecture about sugar, acid, and tooth decay- they’ve known sweetness and want more....

My musician patient in a fetal curl, Tchaikovsky’s “Meditation” plays an endless loop against this climate controlled conspiracy of monitors and machines...

Laziness or disease? You decide.

The moment the maestro flicks his baton, an orchestra thunders and the pianist suffers a stroke. But everyone plays on...

Congratulations and kudos to Dr Richard M. Berlin, whose poem “Eye Contact” was chosen to be included in the 2019 Hippocrates Prize Anthology.

A ghostly glow frames the face of a man with nothing to hide...

Always ask the name of their dog.

Winter had not yet fallen. A crimson tide of red leaves rained down from the heavens...

Occupational hazards in the world of a doughboy.

They ask me to sign the moment before my poetry reading and I comply...

We fled the computer room like inmates after lightning fries the prison fence. Then we rounded with nurses who knew the doses and what made patients moan...

Do I have to speak? I know you know...

I’ve been waiting for one of those nine bare-breasted sisters to land by my side and inspire a sonnet...

The Monarch’s cortex, head of a pin, contains maps of Earth and heavens within...

They love to talk like air traffic controllers: “Angle the spinal needle 20 degrees and push gently toward the midline.” And though I don’t say “Roger”...

Homeless men in Chinatown doorways flick cigarettes and cough, while a dozen nurses forge into Beach Street winter...

Covering for a colleague I begin to startle after the tenth call-med refill requests, side effect questions, and suicidal thoughts...

"Tell me what you see."

Rotten teeth, dirt creased face, he’d come in for a hot and a cot and collapsed with DTs...

There's ego and there's ego.

All summer southwest wind stirs the weeping willows the way my breath disturbs a settled life when I whisper the cancer diagnosis...

Soaked in Mexican sunshine he’s powered back to the Berkshires, all the world’s yellow compressed into a firecracker...

I wanted this to be like a fairy tale walk in the woods before kids, careers, blood clots and bone mets...

Green hills patched with April, snow and I’ve chosen to celebrate. with a full slate of patients.

After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.

When's your teed off time?

We wrote through the night, between moonlight and morning, admissions and discharges, wrote when phones stopped ringing, when pagers stopped paging. We were raw, opening ourselves to chaos and mystery...