Poetry

When I learned my first scale at 45 I knew I would never rip loose and free like the pros who started as teenagers, when time didn’t matter and practicing was just another form of play.

I begin by remembering my hours as a patient and Freud’s “Fundamental Rule”: Say Whatever Comes to Mind...

We do not have to set time aside to do something that helps validate our experience, while simultaneously coping with it. The lesson expressed in this psychiatry resident's poem.

When I’m hungry, I love to stroll past the campus barnyard and visit the colorful, caged characters who live, like me...

The frayed dignity of the patient described in this poem, his intelligence matched by the inexplicable intransigence of his alcoholism, moved this VA psychiatrist to describe the clinical encounter, apropos for April, Alcohol Awareness Month.

I’d love to create a new set every year, our glossy portraits on one side, caduceus in the corner, honors, cure rates, and publications on the back...

What is your first impression of this ink blot?

In the process of both psychotherapy and sculpture, this psychiatrist discovered there is potential for an exciting and rewarding life. Here, a representative piece from his collection.

When a full-time writer's husband was diagnosed with cancer, she found writing poetry helped her cope. She guessed that others would, like her, find their experiences with cancer best expressed through poetry. So began The Cancer Poetry Project.

Three years deep in despair, he’s swallowed every pill I prescribed...

Under the V of her cashmere sweater, sacs of silicone sag in tangled scar, their arc of cleavage a triumph...

If I could be edible, I would want to be a steamed vegetable dumpling, pure white like my doctor’s coat…

While I watch the artist paint, I imagine him in the time of plague crafting a portrait of a Medico della Peste, a Plague Doctor wearing an ibis-like mask...

In the graph, bands of color recede like mountain silhouettes drawn by a child...

I never take calls when I'm with a patient, except today when the phone rings from Boston-liver mets on his scan, biopsy tomorrow...

After all the encores at Tanglewood, the only music left is September’s song of crickets scraping their legs for mates...

The sharp steel wall of the concert hall encloses the melody and wounds the summer sky, a soft yellow glow gathering before moonrise...

Outside, the bluestone patio warmed my bare feet, and I smelled Casablanca lilies and honeysuckle we planted last spring.

Before I knew much psychiatry I met his angry stare in the ER, a homeless man with a three day beard...

We climbed concrete ramps from the subway’s underground world, up to the grandstand and my first vision of heaven...

spring-time territory, raucous and free as a New Orleans . . . trumpet, my patient locked-in to the wild tune

But old colleagues said . . . the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart, . . . a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms

I pictured him at his waiting room door . . . clutching a chart, catching eyes, . . . calling out a name, bewildered

Here's to the lovely trees of Jersey, my home . . . town streets lined with linden and larch, . . . poplar and elm, flowered locusts scenting

I'm reviewing a left ventriculography from a man with chest pain, MI ruled out, his wife dead for a post-crash hour...

Einstein's happiest moment revealed.

Needle sticks and night call, Hep B burrowing skin, bad smells, deep wounds, death, dying, dead wood...

Two yellow feathers and a skull. . . drop from the sky and fall on the brown . . . scar of trail, a sharp-shinned hawk

Each wound speaks its own language.

A poetry reading by psychiatrist Richard Berlin, MD.