The COVID pandemic highlighted a reality that certain healthcare workers have always faced: as they care for others, they also put themselves at risk. How do you handle knowing you could be harmed by the very profession your heart has called you to join? In this powerful short poem, Katy Giebenhain encapsulates the mad courage it can sometimes take to simply go to work at a medical facility: “It’s the job.”

In this gentle yet heart-rending poem, Dr. Sue Curfman follows the notes of Dvorak’s 9th symphony (‘New World’), 2nd movement, as she pictures her patients in pain, “with whom I am privileged to walk.” As the different instruments rise and fade, she likens them to the struggle toward healing that rehabilitation teams – patient and therapist – experience together. The 2nd movement is available online; you can listen to its opening strains as you experience these words unfolding.

This gentle poem honors a lovely lady—“a hundred birthdays…give or take”—who gave her body to science. As the clinicians dissect, observe, and study, the poet juxtaposes the harsh procedures with softer observations. This lady was loved and cared for. The poem pays homage to a life well-lived, and to a final decision to help others learn.

In a poignant cry of honesty, [poet] takes the reader on a journey inside a mind experiencing crippling anxiety. The poem moves from a vivid portrayal of daily fear toward a gradual englightenment about the nature of the condition, and finally, to a warrior-like acceptance of what anxiety is—and most importantly, what it is not.

Download the article (pdf) Table of Contents Quietly I rest, but solitude closes in.No noise is noisier than no noise at all.I’m fading, blanched white

In this series of three striking, spare, and emotionally authentic poems, Marta Tymchenko provides thoughtful insights into three different perspectives on a clinical encounter. What is lost in translation when a loved one needs to interpret thoughts between the patient and the doctor?

Julia Chevan leads us into her experience of a concussion through her moving and intimate poem, revealing the challenge of recognizing a new reality on the road to recovery.

In this exquisite poem, Sophie L. Schott conveys the language that envelops a mother and her infant son, surrounded by complex medical equipment and imagining another narrative, a life not “seen through the telescope of sickness.”

In her poem “The Game,” Anju Kanwar marks the slow progress of time one experiences when haunted by painful thoughts and memories, in the early-morning hours of solitude following a loss.

Vivid, sensorial reflections–of sight, of sound, of touch–create an intimately familiar and entirely unique lyric contemplation on memory and an imagined life-changing injury in Bruce H. Greenfield’s “Imprisoned.”

Dr. Jenifer Markley examines how the poetry of John O’Donohue challenges healthcare workers to reassess their interactions with suffering “at the intersection of the sacred with the profane.”