Diminution
Howard Stein
I have read volumes,
Written volumes,
Taught from volumes.
Now my words are fewer,
More long breaths between them.
I look up after committing
A single phrase to paper,
Linger a while,
Note the long shadows
On blackjack oak
In the late afternoon sun.
At times, I give up
Words altogether, listen
To the wind, watch
The winter wheat grow, savor
The taste of silence,
And give myself over
To the speech of the stars.
About the poet:
A psychoanalytic and medical anthropologist, Howard Stein is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, where he has taught for thirty-three years. A poet as well as a researcher and scholar, he has published six books of poetry, including Seeing Rightly with the Heart, published in late 2010 by Finishing Line Press. In 2006 he was nominated for Oklahoma Poet Laureate. He is currently working on a book of medically related poems to be titled In the Shadow of Asclepius: Poems from American Medicine.
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