BJZ Poems and Musings

New classes of medical students will soon be arriving in our nation’s medical schools. It makes me reflect on my experiences and to examine some of the poems I wrote during that time. Here is a sampling of three that were written in 1981-1983. Two are short little musings that I wrote while feeling overwhelmed by the amount of medical knowledge we were expected to learn and being an undertrained apprentice among all these brilliant doctors. The other recounts what it was like to be on a clinical rotation, sleep-deprived, trying to rest in a call room and being awakened by a pager. The experience of being a physician is rich and fulfilling, but the path to get there is long and has its challenges. But, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Cramming

The rain saturates the most inferior.
The ground is subjugated to succulence.
But what luck to suck a nourishing rain,
And what pain to absorb ten million facts.
Into a brain that holds nine million max.

Apprentice

I have the fatigue
an apprentice feels
who rolls a wagon
without any wheels
who speaks each word
through bitten lips
and dies to gain his master’s whip

On-Call Room Page – the Transposition

Lying in my white flag,
shroud, – sheet;
time is bovine
and jumping fences
in a green field
outside

the hospital
operator whom
I’ve never seen
Is paging me, 4 1 3, 4 1 3,

Lying on the hard slab,
respite, – bunk;
versed in each
of two days’ hours;
in a stream of ills,
well swam.

the exit sign
a dim soft guide;
my shoes, stained coat
and stethoscope.

4 1 3
a man, old, feverish,
but asleep – asleep.

Laying my cold scrawlers,
healers, – hands
on his hot chest;
for him to take from me
this ice,
and me from him
the rest.

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