The road home

Sunday sermons disappear,
Receding in the rear-view mirror;
A roadside pond comes into sight—
Earthly eye, celestial seer.

At the fork I ease to right,
Following the morning light
Underneath the piney stands—
Broken branches, dusted white.

Here the narrow road expands,
Tools between tobacco lands;
Tidy houses, neatly nursed,
Lead me to the poets’ strands.

Tennyson, the first traversed,
Stately silent, couplets terse;
Buttles next, serenely steeped;
Next, Walt Whitman’s leaves of verse.

Shelley’s is the final street,
Making poets block complete,
Nestled round Three Corner Lake,
Rimmed with cottages, replete.

Would that I could boast a stake
In Poets’ Corner real estate;
My lot is but to let it lie—
Homeward bound, the road and I.

Copyright 2012 © Brian T. Maurer

A plea for poetry in medical practice

I was pleased as punch to peruse New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s delightful essay on the relevance of poetry, I Yield My Time to the Gentleman From Stratford-Upon-Avon. Here Keller expounds on the relative weight that a seemingly small, insignificant seminar carried in his course of summer study at the Wharton School of Business.

In my book we would do well to advocate for the inclusion of poetry in the medical curriculum—for largely the same reasons.  more»