This short poem (17 lines) is from Dannie Abse’s collection, Remembrance of Crimes Past, first published in Great Britain in 1990. At one level it evokes the universality of human suffering: in fact, we all carry the bones of dead babies within us. This “connectedness in suffering” is particularly apt for one speaking as a physician (“When I was a medical student / I stole two femurs . . . ”). At another level, however, the poem is transformative. Though he takes the bones from his pocket “sadly,” he uses them as castanets to create music. Thus, shared suffering becomes “the origin of music.”