Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: poem

  • Pink and yellow

    Govind Krishnan Durham, North Carolina, United States   The Magpie by Claude Monet. 1868 – 1869. Musée d’Orsay. Via Wikimedia  I am wearing pink, I have a rosy glow My breaths are even, measured, slow The doctors come and go. Come and go. Come and go. But sometimes they mutter, their heads bowed low. And…

  • Ode to my stethoscope

    Hilton Koppe Lennox Head, Australia   Poet’s note My Littman stethoscope has accompanied me on my journey in medicine across five decades into premature medical retirement. It was definitely more difficult to lay down my stethoscope than it had been for me to recommend medical retirement to many of my patients. This poem includes a…

  • La Couronne

    Sophia Wilson New Zealand   Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. NIAID. CC BY 2.0  Virions, under an electron microscope, resemble a crown. An artist’s soft hued roses and golds, belie the sinister underbelly, the forked tongue. Everything suddenly looks a whole lot different; Today an elderly woman inclined over walking frame, inches down supermarket aisles in search of weekly…

  • of little significance

    Vamsi ReddyKeri JonesAugusta, Georgia, United States VAMSI REDDY is a third-year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia. He completed his undergraduate education at Augusta University in the inaugural class of the BS/MD accelerated medical program. Vamsi enjoys the beauty which pervades through the medical field and has taken to trying to capture a glimpse…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael Salcman Baltimore, Maryland, United States   Self-portrait with fiddling Death. Arnold Böcklin. 1872. Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin   Some subjects are given to the authors of poems and songs, of mechanical puzzles and lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB ward or the low level irritation of a cancer…

  • I tried to write a dementia poem

    Mac Greene Indianapolis, Indiana, United States   I tried to write… Did I tell you already? About the softball team on my first job, and I left my mitt on the front seat of my 1965 Chevy pickup that I sold for a hundred fifty dollars in Rappahannock County, with the ball in the pocket…

  • “Mental Cases” by Wilfred Owen: The suffering of soldiers in World War I

    Alice MacNeill Oxford, United Kingdom   Wilfred Owen plate from Poems (1920). Internet Archive via Wikimedia. Public domain. Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked? Stroke on stroke of pain, — but…

  • The blue pain

    Shirali Raina Noida, India   Deliverance Photography and digital effects by Shirali Raina His black smudged, The white blurred, Grey and only grey His shadowed world. Breathing in doubt, Breathing out dread. Angels in his heart, And demons in the head. His mind in tatters, Blue, blue the pain. Shunned and ragged, The world of…

  • An illuminating experience in my practice

    Gian Battista Danzi Pietra Ligure, Italy   Aevo rarissima nostro Simplicitas (Simplicity is very rare these days) –Ovid, Ars amatoria I, 241-242 Some five years ago, I had the privilege of treating M.A., a visionary and restless soul who used to dabble in writing, and who had been admitted to my Cardiology Division because of…

  • The Tyranny of Optimism — A Hectic in My Blood

    James B. Rickert Bloomington, Indiana, USA   Poet’s statement: “The Tyranny of Optimism” was written after I had spoken to a cancer support group. I became angry when it became apparent that all of us had experienced well-intentioned healthy people asking us to do the impossible: put aside all negative emotions—not mourn the loss of…