Liana Eskola, DO School of Medicine and Public Health 2021 Poem Rita Charon, the godmother of narrative medicine, knows words and patients. She knows doctors too–what we give, what we lose, what we need. How we cry. How we hush our own beating hearts. She knows about pajama time, and all the…
All posts in Writing
One Day
Michelle Kimple, PhD School of Medicine and Public Health 2021 Narrative essay There’s something pernicious about bipolar depression. I think it’s because you know what it feels like to be the complete opposite: to be high on life. When you were manic, everything in your life had meaning. You connected your own dots, and…
Limericks Welcoming a Pandemic’s Last Breaths
Samantha Herndon School of Medicine and Public Health, Collaborative for Reproductive Equity 2021 Poem 1. Waiting to enter the waiting room Springtime hyacinths reluctant to bloom A jab in my arm Or else the funny farm For me it’s vaccine or waxing poetic on doom. 2. Layer on layer of smile-covering cloth Disinfecting, high-grossing,…
Cages
Sheri Johnson School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Medicine 2020 Poem Foil blankets lay bare All our woundedness and fear Rest, weary ones, rest.
A world on fire
Ariel Niforatos School of Medicine and Public Health 2020 Poem Sometimes I hear the sky speak in low cadences and agitated whispers continuous musings of a world much older than we are It tells me of the Beginning when the first bud of life took in its first breath And it tells me of…
Seek
Nasia Safdar, MD, PhD School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Medicine 2020 Poem There is in each of us, a yearning For respect Earn it you say? To the mother To the homemaker To the invisible overtime worker A throw-away remark Or perhaps a carefully thought out remark Shreds Right down to…
Restless
Toby Campbell, MD, MSCI School of Medicine and Public Health 2020 Poem Living, like I am, Where nothing is simple and nothing is normal. Dying, like I am, In slow motion. Here, in death’s shadow, every minute matters. The mundane and the vital feel too much the same: A bath and a podcast and a…
My Land
Ryan McAdams, MD School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology 2020 Poem they say doctors make the worst patients. do patients make the best doctors? horizontal in a head cage, slid in the ceramic catacomb, the MRI magnet preps a warning blast of phaser fire– five seconds of silence.…
The Last Seven
Anna Shaul School of Nursing 2020 Poem Seven minutes. Seven minutes of pure stillness, the neurons of the body firing less and less until the brain is no longer all-knowing. Seven minutes of paralysis; the only piece clinging on to reality is my inner persona. Is it comforting to have these seven minutes of…
Hephaestus
Dipesh Navsaria, MPH, MSLIS, MD School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Pediatrics 2020 Poem I think often of Hephaestus Artisan of the Gods As spoken of by Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and beyond. I think often of the Olympians Looking down at him Bent over his Forge. I wonder if they told him…