Showing 41 - 50 of 74 annotations in the genre "Poetry"

The Worm: Elderside Clinic, Jamaica

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Children wasting away, in pain, infected with parasites whose life cycle continues "bodies to fingers, / fingers to lips, of lips to eggs / and eggs to worms." That cycle is echoed in the human experiences of "loneliness to pangs of loss" and of "deep escape to deep connection." The actual parasites take on symbolic significance and become the worm that inhabits us all, whether we be sick kids or weary health care providers.

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Tumbleweed

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Father reappears 28 years after deserting the family and living like a "tumbleweed"--playing bit parts in movies and drifting around alone. The son finds him strapped into a chair, drooling into a cup, dying of a lung disease. His father tells him, "A loner’s like a tumbleweed; / he breaks off, blows away, dries up."

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Sunsets

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The poet movingly describes the sunset of his father’s life in the context of their relationship, now, and in the recollected past. Now the son brings his crippled father to see a beautiful beach sunset, but the process is so difficult that they settle in too late to catch it. When he was younger, the son imagined that he would one day take his father on excursions to wild and beautiful places, where they would talk intimately about important matters and death was not a concern. "When I was young, I dreamed we arrived . . . with plenty of time before sunset. / The sky was glorious, and he could stand."

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The Six Hundred Pound Man

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The extraordinary image of a six hundred pound man, spread across two beds, dying, whom the doctor might at first find to be grotesque, is transformed in the doctor's dream. In that dream he sees the man as the center of a ceremony in which healers "wrestle the souls of old bodies back to bones . . . back back to their beginnings." The doctor comes to realize that this "worthless and alien" body is beautiful.

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Shall Inherit

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Pale, gaunt children from the backwoods hills of Kentucky bring their stool specimens to school so the visiting physician can check for worms. But these sinewy kids come from a long line of leathery ancestors "bred from one tough root"--and they keep on surviving whether they have worms or not. They "shall inherit" the earth, whether or not physicians treat them.

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The Power of Inclination

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The wife of an alcoholic is at her wits' end, realizing that love for him and the ruin he has made of their lives cannot be reconciled. She entertains the thought of killing him "quickly, not piece by piece / like he killed me," if the medical system won't take him off her hands.

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My Uganda--for Sister Concepta Najjemba

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

An African nun, in Pittsburgh, identifies with her home country of Uganda, envisioning the brutality of the civil war, torturing her father and murdering her brother. Her body is like her country--"frightened / delirious / insensate / and holy." Sleepless, she sits on the edge of her bed and prays--"her prayer is sweet, sweet medicine" both for her own distress and, somehow, for her country’s.

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Medicine Stone

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The author begins by describing a "medicine dance" that he attended at an Indian reservation and the stone he keeps as a souvenir. However, back in the city, the stone's healing powers are meaningless, eclipsed by the powers of conventional medicine. Yet, the author keeps the stone as "an aspect of soul that lasts"; a reminder that healing is not confined to the physical body, but is influenced by the mind and soul as well.

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The Man with Stars Inside Him

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

During the physical examination of an elderly cancer patient, the doctor considers the tell-tale symptoms of pneumonia. While the patient is dying, the physician imagines that the symptoms represent the birth of a universe and that the patient is becoming a part of the galaxy.

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Jerusalem

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The son narrator of this poem has asked his Jamaican physician-father a number of questions. His father is a great healer, saving thousands of his countrymen through medicine, surgery, and preaching. Although the "Queen receives him in London and gives him the Empire", his father knows how useless that is, and "puts the British Empire into a drawer of memories." All that London pomp and ceremony is a different world from Kingston, "Smoldering under the weight of tin and grease." The father's vision is of "Jerusalem, a black city full of his sons."

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