When I think about the intersection of poetry and medicine, one of the first names I think of is Richard Berlin. Author first of the chapbook Code Blue, then of the collection How JFK Killed My Father (Pearl Editions 2003; reviewed here), Berlin writes poignant, startling poems about medicine that illuminate something important about our common humanity. (He also happens to live in Berkshire County, as I do; we met some years ago when we both participated in a reading from Holding True, a letterpress anthology published by Mad River Press.)

Richard has smart things to say about why doctors need poetry. The Psychiatric Times graciously offers an archive of his poems which I recommend browsing at length. (They also offer a terrific annotation of his work, written by nurse and poet Cortney Davis, whose work is worth exploring in its own right.) As I prepare for my first on-call night at Albany Medical Center tonight, I'm finding his poems especially resonant.

Richard's poem Sleight of Hand always blows me away -- the tenderness of the encounter, the reverence with which the narrator treats the old woman's body, the turn of the diagnosis, the ending like a kick to the gut. I love, too, the spareness of Playing God at the Hospital, which isn't at all about what you might imagine. Hospital Food offers insight into our health and our hungers. Lately I've been struck by First Night On-Call, Coronary Care Unit, maybe because the CCU is one of the seven intensive care units I'll be expected to visit on my rounds.

The prospect of hospital chaplaincy work gives me a world of new respect for everyone in medicine: doctors, nurses, orderlies, technicians, the many people who confront the pitfalls of embodiment daily. Maybe the best poem of Richard's for me to read today -- since I seem to be looking for a poem to reread repeatedly, like thumbing a string of mala beads -- is What I Love, song of praise to his profession and his work. I take comfort in the lines

I love my patients, not as a group, but one by one,
each person teaching me the trials
of suffering and survival, every saga different,
even with the same disease...
...And they come with their own yearning
questions I answer by listening without judgment,
the constant miracle that listening can be enough.

Miracle, indeed. May my listening be enough for those who seek me out, tonight and every night.

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