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Does the Buddha Play Pool?

Lenora Lapidus May 1, 2009 No Comments

Come Medicine Buddha

Come shine your rays upon me
Penetrate deep within my body
To quell my queasy stomach
And soothe my aching bones.

Let those golden arrows
Shoot deep within my frame
Extinguishing the round tumors
That live inside of me.

Like a pool cue poised and ready
Aim straight for the triangle
Number 6 in right side pocket
Red 4 to far left corner.

Knocking away each colored ball
Dropping steadily into the pockets
Clearing away the hard assortment
Until only white and black remain.

The 8 ball holding fast
White blood cell gearing up.

And, then, a final shot–and POP!
No more colored balls
The table’s cleared.

About the poet:

Lenora Lapidus is an attorney and the director of the Women’s Rights

Mistaken Identity

Kathleen Grieger April 10, 2009 No Comments

Surgery finished,

I finally sleep

Pushing my shoulders,
the technician wakes me

“Come now, we need
a chest x-ray”

Smiling, she pulls me
into position

The x-ray machine
tight against me

Finally getting a chance,
I ask what she is doing

“Oh,” she says “I have
the wrong one

You are not a 64
year old male”

Lying me down,
she walks away

As I fall back to sleep,
I wonder, now bald

what I must
look like

About the poet:

Kathleen Grieger has published poetry in many venues, including Free Verse, Caduceus, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, The Healing Muse and online in Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine and Breath and Shadow. She has written hundreds of poems about her brain surgeries as well as her

Cure

Veneta Masson March 20, 2009 1 Comment

Veneta Masson

In Latin it means care,
conjures priests and temples
the laying on of hands
sacred pilgrimage
sacrifice
the sickbed
invalid and
solemn attendants.

How far we have come.
Today’s English
has neatly expunged
these purely human elements.
Cure is impersonal, consequential
unequivocal, sometimes violent–
the annihilation
of the thing that ails.

This nurse
approaching the patient
has discarded temple garb
for practical scrubs.
His gloved hands
unsheathe the magic bullet,
shoot it through the central line
where it locks onto the target cells.

For the not-yet-cured,
there is still sacred pilgrimage–
that dogged slog
to the high tech shrine,
the health food store,
the finish line of the annual race
where, etched on each undaunted face,
is a gritty tale of survival.

About

Read More »

The Women of Victoria Ward

Muriel Murch February 6, 2009 No Comments

Muriel Murch

I remember
The women of Victoria Ward.

The laughter of Liz,
before there were good prostheses
before falsies
left, right or bilateral
were built into the cup size of your choice.
Pacing the corridors
and knitting.
Ready to go home.
Building her strength
with a strand of yarn
Tumbled upwards from the empty cup
against that scarlet scar
beneath the bodice
of her bright summer dress.

I remember
Winnie’s eyes
watching feces pour
in a torrent
down her abdomen
searing her flesh
until I bathed her body
changed the bed
and wiped away
her tears.
We named that
foolish pink protuberance
her own John Thomas.
Her slow, shy smile
heralded victory
for the moment.

About the poet:

Muriel Murch (//livinglit@earthlink.net/“>livinglit@earthlink.net)

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Apologies

Alex Okun January 16, 2009 No Comments

Alex Okun

You were right.
That IV was no good.
Looking at his arm all swollen like that,
I thought, “That says it all.”

I’m sorry we kept bothering you.
“Please don’t wake him for vitals,”
You told us.

Sometimes we don’t see the signs.

I was hoping she would stay home longer,
That you would have had more time together.
She liked starting school every September.
She loved that backpack.

I’m sorry it always took so long
To get into the room.
I’m sorry I took so long to call you back.
I liked our long talks.

If I say “we,”
Then maybe I’m not to blame.
We don’t know why some children
Develop this complication.

We don’t know why
The brain is so

Read More »

Tree Years

Addeane Caelleigh December 26, 2008 No Comments

Addeane Caelleigh

We used to trade off,
she said.

He hated trees dying in our living room.
I always loved the blue spruces
decorated on my December birthday

But his father fell near theirs
dying in their living room
one childhood night.

So we’d have a year with tangled lights, a crooked stand
he sometimes helped me put together
Then a year with presents stacked on the corner table,
with no dry needles to sweep.

Turn and turn again
a solstice pendulum.
A ring for each alternating year

That was before the fog that eats my life,
some years feast, none famine,
always a forecast of more

She says, I think now
he’d welcome any tree, any year.

About the poet:

After many years as

Read More »

Running Out of Metaphors

Howard Stein December 5, 2008 1 Comment

Howard F. Stein

His rapidly metastasizing cancer
was not his only problem:
He was not only running out
of life, he was running out of metaphors.
Metaphors had sustained him
for the four months since
they discovered the spot.
He started out
losing weight as “The Incredible
Shrinking Man”; then he became
Gregor Samsa for a while;
briefly he was the consumptive Violetta,
soon followed by Ivan Ilych.
He even remembered Susan Sontag
and Solzhenitsyn and so railed
at his wasting. He leaped
from metaphor to metaphor the way
a stone skips over water. He asked
all the questions everyone asks,
but felt no comfort from
the answers.
Companions and kin beset him
like Job’s friends. He graciously refused
their unctuous offerings, their leaden words.

Read More »

little black boy

Jimmy Moss November 14, 2008 No Comments

Jimmy Moss

little black boy
sit down.
fold your hands into your lap
and put your lap into order
now cry me a little song.
sing me a little note about me
caring about what you care about,
then dream me a little dream.
and when your tears turn into
oases and exposed rivers
stand up
and pour me a little cup
fill it with every broken promise
and the unfulfilled moments of
belated birthdays and first days
of the school year when your
clothes were unkempt…then
tell me a little secret
about how–you wish your father
bothered enough to be a father
or fathered another version of you,
so that you could have a friend
and then
write me a little poem.
make me

Read More »

In the Taxi to the MRI

Rachel Hadas October 24, 2008 No Comments

Rachel Hadas

I try to concentrate on the weather. Everything
deliquesces into simile.
Sleet ticks onto the windshield like a clock.
Truth blinks on/off like a stuck traffic signal.
It is better to live in the light but the light is flickering.
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak-
Poetic paradox understood too late
or maybe just in time. What time is it?
A small white poodle in a quilted coat
lifts a leg to pee against a hydrant
on Sixtieth Street, and we are nearly there,
early, of course. And since (she said) my heart
has been wrung out, no, broken, this is the …
this has to be … The sentence will not end.
The mind pulls, stretches, struggles, and

Read More »

Rx

Veneta Masson October 3, 2008 No Comments

Veneta Masson

Politicians…were quick to rise to the defense

of a particularly vulnerable population. As a group,
dual-eligibles [Medicare-Medicaid] have incomes below
the poverty rate…and take an average of 15 medications a day.

Washington Post
January 14, 2006

This is how it works:
as wealth trickles down
to the poor and old
it turns into pills.

So M and S, their slender portfolios
long since depleted, can still
compete for bragging rights.
I take twenty a day, says M.
Ha! counters S, I take so many
they had to put in a port.

G presides over the corporate enterprise,
his specialty, mergers and acquisitions.
With combined assets (his own and his wife’s)
filling two cupboards, he allocates resources,
tracks inventory, restocks
from Canada and

Read More »

Antibodies

Shanna Germain September 12, 2008 No Comments

Shanna Germain

At twenty, I started working the HIV
ward, midnight to morning. Left my husband
sleeping, mouth-open to the air, to
drive through the dark body of the city.

Every shift, the warning about infections.
Me sliding on booties, disposable
gown and gloves. Even through the mask,
you could smell decay, the way viruses

swept through bodies. I did what was needed:
held hands through double-gloves, took blood
or confessions when I could, told off-white lies
to thin cracked lips that knew the truth.

Once, a year or so into it, I stuck
myself, pointed red end of an IV needle
left in a lab coat pocket. So small a thing
it almost didn’t hurt going in, only

leaving, small pop and smear

Read More »

Physician’s Exasperation

Howard Stein August 15, 2008 No Comments

Howard F. Stein

We know so much about you–
Your blood, your urine, your internal organs.
We can see everything.
There is precious little that
Is not wrong with you medically.
Still, you do not listen to us.
You miss appointments;
You don’t go to referrals we’ve made.
Do you defy us or merely not understand
How dire your condition is?
You could die at any time,
We have told you more than once.
Still, you muddle along as if all we know
Does not matter. Tell me, what
Is missing from our story?
Have we failed to impress upon you
The urgency of the hour? Speak to me.
I will listen now.

About the poet:

Howard Stein PhD, a psychoanalytic and medical anthropologist,

Read More »

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: poems/poetry

Does the Buddha Play Pool?

Mistaken Identity

Cure

The Women of Victoria Ward

Apologies

Tree Years

Running Out of Metaphors

In the Taxi to the MRI

Rx

Antibodies

Physician’s Exasperation

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: poems/poetry

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