The Leaf That Fell From A Bird

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m in that age group where the material aspects of life are less interesting or if it’s because with children grown and gone I have the mental space to focus on other things. Things like poetry didn’t used to do it for me. My ability to see into the true meaning of a creative piece of writing, though still abysmal, is getting better as I push my brain to think in those terms. I appreciate the clever turn of a word or a beautiful visual phrase that does more than convey a concrete action. Any poetry I’ve ever written could easily be seen on the student wall of a fourth grade classroom, no offense to fourth graders.

It’s with this new energy that I stumbled across a recent NY Times article (“The Doctor as Poet”) describing a poetry contest offered to the med students by Yale University School of Medicine and University College London Medical School. The modest $1500 prize was anonymously offered by a patient interested in literature and they expected only a few student entries, but more than 160 were submitted! The article’s author, Dr. Pauline Chen, writes that poetry has long been linked to medicine. She writes that “in mythology the Greek god Apollo was responsible for, among other things, both healing and poetry.”  Poets like John Keats and Oliver Wendall Holmes Sr. were trained as physicians. Though not poets I think of award-winning authors such as Khaled Hosseini and Abraham Verghese (of Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone fame respectively) both of whom are physicians.

Chen says that in recent decades the medical profession has been preoccupied with primarily high-tech approaches. More recently they are placing more emphasis again on the patient as a person, and “are once again turning to poetry for inspiration. And education.” Associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Rafael Campo, an award-winning poet himself, uses poetry in his classes. He has used “Cancer Winter” by Marilyn Hacker to help students better understand the experience and feelings of a patient dealing with the news of her cancer. “Poetry does a better job in teaching because it is about embracing the human aspect of suffering, not just knowing how many lymph nodes are positive and where the pain is on a 1-to-10 scale.”

Below is one of the poems submitted by one of the med students who entered the contest. I particularly love the imagery in this poem. It was written by Noah Capurso.

Aphasia

We are taught that the brain
Is a set of highways;
Corpus callosum,
Spinothalamic,
Optic radiation.


But there are other roads, as well.
Scenic neural backroads
That are hidden from view;
Dusty and seldom used.


Sometimes we can see them
When the highways are down;
From cancer,
Surgery,
Or a stroke.


Our patient had a brain tumor.
We tested her highways
With a feather drawing;
“What is this?” we asked her.


And the answer she gave
Came by the scenic route;
“A leaf
That fell
From a bird.”