"The Garden of Eden"

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem "The Garden of Eden," which is featured in the April 2024 issue of Psychiatric Times. It is early April, which is about the time Dr Berlin's garden calls to him. Here in this poem, he describes how one April, long ago, under the clay crust, he made a joyful discovery.

The Garden of Eden

Today when the ground was no longer

too wet to work and the world was all lilac

perfume, I pulled my scuffle hoe hard

through the clay’s crust and heard

the blade scrape metal and earth.

I believed the sound came from nothing

more than a buried beer can tab

I dropped while foraging through

lettuce and sugar peas last spring.

But what surfaced from fresh manure

was my lost wedding band, buried for years

in earth that nurtures Love-Lies-Bleeding,

a ring from a forty-year marriage, rescued

from the filth of paradise, hosed off, shining,

my cracked fingernails caked with dirt.

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 Freud on My Couch.