We only have our body

[AlPater]

Poetry and Medicine | June 28, 2016 
We only have our body
Carol Snyder Halberstadt
JAMA. 2016;315(24):2737. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.2000. 

 

Curl, and rest your head.

There is no separation.

We are the rooms and the gates

that stand in open places,

unsealed and closed behind us, becoming fewer.

How do we move through the pain of what cannot continue?

When I was five years old and my memories began

in the sun among blackberries,

I found a hen becoming maggots,

its feathers of beauty stirring on the earth.

Death cannot be healed. Our birth

rises to it, as a firefly from the shadows.