Medical poems
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The General Prologue
© Geoffrey Chaucer
There was also a Reeve, and a Millere,
A Sompnour, and a Pardoner also,
A Manciple, and myself, there were no mo'.
September Notebook: Stories
© Robert Hass
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
There’s only one natural death, and even that’s Bedcide For the post-mortem amusement of Richard Brautigan
© Edward Dorn
A B H O R E N C E S
November 10, 1984
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
© Robert Browning
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs,
The not-incurious in God's handiwork
Essay on Psychiatrists
© Robert Pinsky
It's crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
Days of 1994: Alexandrians
© Marilyn Hacker
for Edmund White
Lunch: as we close the twentieth century,
death, like a hanger-on or a wanna-be
sits with us at the cluttered bistro
table, inflecting the conversation.
Heart by Rick Campbell: American Life in Poetry #169 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I remember being scared to death when, at about thirty years of age, I saw an x-ray of my skull. Seeing one's self as a skeleton, or receiving any kind of medical report, even when the news is good, can be unsettling. Suddenly, you're just another body, a clock waiting to stop. Here's a telling poem by Rick Campbell, who lives and teaches in Florida.
Heart
The Baby's Vengeance
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Weary at heart and extremely ill
Was PALEY VOLLAIRE of Bromptonville,
In a dirty lodging, with fever down,
Close to the Polygon, Somers Town.
Medical History by Carrie Shipers: American Life in Poetry #152 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-
© Ted Kooser
A child with a sense of the dramatic, well, many of us have been that child. Here's Carrie Shipers of Missouri reminiscing about how she once wished for a dramatic rescue by screaming ambulance, only to find she was really longing for the comfort of her mother's hands.
Medical History
A Poem For The Meeting Of The American Medical Association At New York, May 5, 1853
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
I HOLD a letter in my hand,-
A flattering letter, more's the pity,-
Out of Sorts
© William Schwenck Gilbert
When you find you're a broken-down critter,
Who is all of a trimmle and twitter,
A Poem. For the AMA at New York, 1853
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
FOR THE MEETING OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
AT NEW YORK, MAY 5, 1853
Good Old Moon
© Li Po
When I was a boy I called the moon a
white plate of jade, sometimes it looked
like a great mirror hanging in the sky,
first came the two legs of the fairy
Is/Not
© Margaret Atwood
Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwisesex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavitiesyou are not my doctor
you are not my cure,nobody has that
The Widow at Windsor
© Rudyard Kipling
'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
She 'as ships on the foam -- she 'as millions at 'ome,
An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
