Showing 51 - 60 of 751 Poetry annotations

Old Man Playing with Children

Ransom, John Crowe

Last Updated: Dec-21-2015
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

“Old Man Playing with Children” is a 20-line poem (5 quatrains with an ABBA rhyme scheme) describing an elderly man playing outside with his grandsons. The poem opens with the observation of a “discreet householder” that this “grandsire”—whom he sees dancing around a “backyard fire of boxes” in “warpaint and feathers”—will “set the house on fire.” The second quatrain introduces the point of view of a different spectator (perhaps the poet, but this remains unclear), who proceeds, in first person, to “unriddle” for the reader the thoughts of the old man, since the latter’s is a mind one “cannot open with conversation.” 

The remainder of the poem is in quotations, reflecting the soliloquy of the old man - as related to us by this secondary spectator - explicating his reasons for playing so exuberantly with his grandchildren, reasons which are, remarkably, quite straightforward and logical, yet couched in mordant commentary. The first of the three stanzas explaining his behavior and views is justly famous: 

"Grandson, grandsire. We are equally boy and boy.
Do not offer your reclining-chair and slippers
With tedious old women talking in wrappers.
This life is not good but in danger and in joy." 

The playful old man goes on to reject the values of “you/the elder to these and younger to me/who are penned as slaves by properties and causes.” Rather, the old man affirms his decision not to repeat the “ignominies unreckoned” of his own sedate adulthood. Instead, he “will be more honorable in these days.”, i.e., playing with children.

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Skin for Ricky

Schiedermayer, David

Last Updated: Dec-10-2015
Annotated by:
Nixon, Lois LaCivita

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The physician-narrator is looking in on a 30 year old patient named Ricky. Readers immediately learn that the patient has cerebral palsy: his ear mashed flat, his neck contorted into a tight C, almost quadriplegic. These first stanza clinical observations are indisputable. The narrator then shifts from the medical facts to more subjective thoughts ranging from Ricky’s previous treatment responses and medications to Ricky’s adult heterosexual response to the proximity of a female, and finally to the narrator’s own wishes for this patient. Ricky’s parents, the narrator notes, have similarly but uncomfortably witnessed their son’s ogling response to a pretty nurse or doctor or a provocative adult television image. The parents’ response, he notes, to these observations has been to redirect Ricky’s focus by switching the channel to Nickelodeon, a program geared towards children.  Not unlike situations in several writings by William Carlos Williams, this physician has moved from objective medical information to his own interior thoughts about Ricky’s circumstances and confinement.  Rather than sticking with the facts associated with the patient’s medical condition, he wonders, imagines, and expresses in this poem seemingly un-doctorly thoughts. 

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Not God: A Play in Verse

Straus, Marc

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Not God is a "play in verse" with two characters, a hospitalized patient and the patient's doctor. The scare quotes indicate the fluid quality of Not God, which the author originally conceived as a sequence of poems spoken in a patient's voice. Subsequently, he added the doctor poems (monologues) to create a "dialog" between the two voices. Once again, scare quotes suggest the atypical quality of this dialogue, since the two characters express different feelings and perspectives on the situation, but do not directly address one another. The play version has received several performances at colleges and small theaters.The patient speaks first in a monologue that begins "A man's cough bounces down the hallway / like pick up sticks... " and ends with "I am here two weeks." (p. 7) It soon becomes evident that he/she has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy. The doctor has changed this person's life by speaking "one word," after which "nothing / would ever be the same again." (p. 10). The patient is knowledgeable, accepting of his/her condition, a keen observer with a good sense of humor, as in "Doldrums" (p. 19) and "Cricket" (p. 23), and a person who affirms life in spite of adversity. The doctor is burdened with the power of medical knowledge. In particular, he understands the deadly meaning of signs and symptoms: "We say / excess water and swelling of the belly, knowing / full well... / an ovarian cancer is almost certain." (p. 33) But the meaning this represents is chaos: there is nothing humane or transcendent about cancer. Unlike his baseball card collection in childhood ("Shoebox," p. 35), cancer is neither confined nor orderly. In the second act, the patient sympathizes with the doctor whose "head is so cluttered / with obligatory data." Paradoxically, the doctor must be protected because he is "filled with dying." (p. 41) The doctor becomes angry with the burden, "Why / ask me a question that only God can answer?" (p. 49) and cries out that his work is "alchemy, / potions and witches' brews." (p. 54) In the end, while dying, the patient imagines "a bridge that can cross / the Atlantic." (p. 68), while the doctor speaks a prayer, "The word cure, dear God, is always / near my lips, though I have been constrained from / saying it aloud." (p. 66)

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One Word

Straus, Marc

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this collection (80 pages), Marc Straus speaks of the inadequacy of communication and knowledge in medicine; the pauses, the distance, the hesitations. You think you know what you are doing, "But no, they always ask the question / I never knew." ("The Log of Pi") "The question / might be so simple, so clear / that you’re unprepared to answer." ("Questions and Answers") Though words are in one way inadequate, the medical word carries great power: " . . . I knew that moment / I would say one word for her and nothing / would ever be the same again." (One Word, annotated in this database.)The poet comes to understand that he represents both sides of medicine, both the detached and distant Dr. Gold, and the warm and trustworthy Dr. Green. (See annotation of Dr. Gold & Dr. Green) Unfortunately, this knowledge only comes about after the patient has died ("Dr. Gold & Dr. Green, II"). We learn from experience, sometimes too late.

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One Word

Straus, Marc

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The speaker reflects that "life is sometimes reduced / to a single word . . . . " He remembers one incident at a bus stop, another interviewing a man "for a job in my lab." Then there was the time a woman "walked / into my office for one thing . . . . " He discovered a "fullness" in her neck and knew that the word he would say to her, the one word, would change her life: "nothing / would ever be the same again."

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Sleep Talker

Shafer, Audrey

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This fine collection of work by Audrey Shafer is subtitled "Poems by a Doctor/Mother." The book begins with a section containing poems of personal history and experience ("that I call home"), descends into the nether world of anesthesia ("not quite sleep"), and in the final section returns to the light with a new perspective on the texture and occurrences of ordinary life ("okay for re-entry").Among the more medically oriented poems, see especially "Spring," "Anesthesia," "Three Mothers," Monday Morning (see annotation in this database), "Gurney Tears," "Center Stage," and "Reading Leaves." "Don’t Start, Friend" takes up the topic of substance abuse among anesthesiologists (or physicians, in general).

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Monday Morning

Shafer, Audrey

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

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The poet, an anesthesiologlist and mother, describes her early morning departure from home as she prepares to begin her professional day, leaving behind her little son and the physical and emotional warmth of their relationship. After arriving at work, she readies the operating suite for her first patient, taking pleasure in "the rote motions," noting that "all is bright pristine ordered."Having made the transition from home to work she tries to remember her son’s "just-awakened warmth." The poem ends with the arrival of her patient, who is naked and ready to be put to sleep (anesthetized), inverting the opening image of her sleepy, naked child and their leave-taking.

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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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