Winter Poem
Almost Sisters
once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower
Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943) by permission
Before, you were a story:
a stack of pictures and letters that gathered,
growing up.
You were my father’s
smiles, his
early morning long-distance phone calls,
his late brother’s face
in a little girl.
Post-op Tonic
Catalpa seed pods curled beneath white ground
carve elliptical edges in snow
distressed by last week’s single day
melt. Arms of greenbrier stretch across
the trail to prick an ear exposed
to a sub-zero day in January. There are
more turkey tracks than footprints
along Fox Ridge. Behind piles of loess,
locust thorns point the way, a game
trail to bottomland, now a frozen lake
from the one day thaw. She examines seeded
scat and scat with fur, steps over the berm
heaved beside the lake, then tests the ice
for depth. She hears sound from her feet over
bottle bottom ice, crusted snow and frozen
ground. Nuthatch and woodpeckers dig bugs
in old Cottonwoods. Up on Badger Ridge
she finds a half bushel of cracked walnut
shells littering the spot she stops to purvey
the scene. Before heading home she soaks
in blue sky and honey waves of prairie
grass planted in skiffs of snow.
Molly O’Dell (b.1954 )
Reprinted from January 13, 2010 with permission JAMA © 2013
American Medical Association
Now we sit in this space; our grandmother’s
bed, together,
a bowl of tangerines
between us. You are real.
We smile at each other in silence,
each without a sister,
feeding one another.
The peels gather,
curled in piles, like your letters on my father’s desk.
The desert sun splashes
over the room through the scratched glass,
and the citrus vapors wade
in the warmth.
I watch as your scarf falls
onto your shoulders, reaching over
to deliver the next slice.
We have the same hair, you know.
We have the same hair, after all.
Sara Bahraini (b. 1987)
1st place Virginia Tech Carilion winner Poetry in
Medicine Competition 2013
Poems in the Waiting Room is an initiative of the Dr.
Robert L.A. Keeley Healing Arts Program at Carilion
Clinic. This issue was produced in collaboration with the
Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. To learn more
about the Dr. Robert L.A. Keeley Healing Arts Program
or submit your poem, contact the Carilion Clinic Foundation at 540-224-5398 or healingarts@carilionclinic.org.
Copyright title PitWR
Copyright of recent poems retained by authors
Volume 1, Issue 1
Evening in Eden from Paradise Lost
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Hope
Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied, for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung:
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires. Hesperus that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.
John Milton (1608-1674)
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were arranged in
columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886)
Jenny Kissed Me
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
Loss and Gain
When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained,
What I have missed with what attained,
Little room do I find for pride.
I am aware
How many days have been idly spent;
How like an arrow the good intent
Has fallen short or been turned aside.
But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
Henry Longfellow (1807-1882)
Élévation
Over lakes, over streams, up above valleys
Mountains, woods, the clouds, the seas,
Beyond the sun, out beyond ether,
Beyond the confines of some starry sphere.
O my mind, you move with such agility Like a good swimmer overcome with delight in the
waves.
You crisscross through the deepest immensity,
Voluptuous, inexpressibly free.
Fly! far from the morbid mists and vapours
Of this world—Go! purify yourself in finer air,
And drink, a pure and divine liqueur:
Its clear fire filling the limpid spaces.
Behind the tedium and endless problems
That load their weight on our transient lives,
Happy are those whose winged spirit flies—
Launched toward fields of light, serene;
Those whose thoughts, like a lark on the wing
Fly free into the morning skies—
Who float on life, understand without trying
The language of flowers, the speech of silent things.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
New translation: Isobel M. Campbell by permission
Silence
‘Tis better to sit here beside the sea,
Here on the spray-kissed beach,
In silence, that between such friends as we
Is full of deepest speech.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift
We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift
toward my white, mysterious house,
both of us so quiet,
keeping the silence as we go along.
And sweeter even than the singing of songs
is this dream, now becoming real:
the swaying of branches brushed aside
and the faint ringing of your spurs.
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
Anna Akhmatova, “We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift,” translated by Jane Kenyon, from Collected Poems. Copyright ©2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the
permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.