How I Started to Use a Cane

Author(s):

"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..."

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem, "How I Started to Use a Cane" by Owen Lewis, an award winning poet-psychiatrist and the author of 2 poetry chapbooks and 5 collections of poems. He is also an active clinician and a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, where he teaches narrative medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics.

In his new poetry collection, Knock-knock, published by Dos Madres Press, Lewis creates the imaginary persona of an older physician who should have known what is in store for him as he ages.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 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 Tender Fences.