Showing 391 - 400 of 483 annotations in the genre "Poem"

The Size of the Lesion

Straus, Marc

Last Updated: Dec-09-1996
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

Sometimes communication is best served when it doesn't communicate baldly and precisely. In this 12 line poem "a daughter comes in late / and you don't say exactly what you feel . . . ." You tell a patient "the x-ray showed / little change, knowing they won't ask / if the lesion's a little smaller or larger."

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Stroke

Smith, Dave

Last Updated: Dec-09-1996
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The patient lies in the hospital after having a stroke. The "word" is the patient's best friend, but suddenly it's become what "you can't say." "You lie flat / in the white yards of the clinic" unable to find the word. Like a dog, it "drags its chain over the emptied / bowl, barks," but the patient is unable to call it or command it. The stroke victim must simply wait and listen.

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After Reading 'Mickey in the Night Kitchen' for the Third Time Before Bed

Dove, Rita

Last Updated: Nov-22-1996
Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

This poem is a very natural, very private mother-daughter moment that celebrates the female body. A light-spirited let's-name-body-parts moment has emerged on the bed as "My daughter spreads her legs / to find her vagina." What follows is part spontaneous, light-spirited comparison between the daughter's body and her mother's ("She demands / to see mine"), and a reminder that this "is what a stranger cannot touch / without her yelling."

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Brown Lung

Rash, Ron

Last Updated: Nov-01-1996
Annotated by:
Terry, James

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

Sometimes I'd spend the whole night coughing up / what I'd been breathing all day at work. With this beginning to a 20-line poem, the author presents the plain, straightforward suffering of a laborer with lungs damaged as a result of his job in a cotton mill. The doctor he consults simply advises that he get a different job, at which the speaker scoffs: "as if / a man who had no land or education / could find himself another way to live." His foreman more humanely transfers him to an outside position loading boxcars. But the damage has been done: "I'd still wake / gasping for air at least one time a night. / When I dreamed I dreamed of bumper crops / of Carolina cotton in my chest."

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The Recognition

Haskell, Dennis

Last Updated: Oct-30-1996
Annotated by:
Terry, James

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

An apostrophe to a friend of the author, a devout Catholic who died of leukemia, this poem moves through a spectrum of grieving emotions. The poet remembers an ironic comment: "and you said, when someone asked / if you’d have the operation offered, / ’I don’t have a choice’: / you were right. Your choice was death / or death." Later, he angrily swears at the attempted reassurances of the priest, developing his own bleak vision of God, but he finally concludes: "I can’t scorn your beliefs, / dare not laugh, suffer or sneer. / After all, it’s me who’s writing this / as if you’d hear."

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Man and Woman Go through the Cancer Ward

Benn, Gottfried

Last Updated: Oct-25-1996
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

A man and woman walk through a cancer ward in which the man points out, "Here in this row are wombs that have decayed . . ." In other rows are "breasts" and "this great mass of fat . . . . " He instructs his companion to feel "rosary of small soft knots" on one woman's chest. The patients are dying. There is little to be done. "Here the grave rises up about each bed." Yet, "sap prepares to flow. Earth calls."

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Sun and Moon

Kenyon, Jane

Last Updated: Oct-21-1996
Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The speaker describes being hospitalized for depression, and then, in the end, her return home.

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The Sandy Hole

Kenyon, Jane

Last Updated: Oct-21-1996
Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

A four-line poem describing the burial of an infant and the reaction of other mourners to the grief-stricken father.

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In the Nursing Home

Kenyon, Jane

Last Updated: Oct-21-1996
Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

A very short poem, describing the increasingly circumscribed life of a dying woman in a nursing home, a woman who "is like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in." The final lines are a moving plea for God to bring the woman to a gentle death.

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Eating the Cookies

Kenyon, Jane

Last Updated: Oct-21-1996
Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The speaker describes cleaning out the house of a friend/relative who has recently died. She rewards each small accomplishment in her sorting through of the dead woman's possessions by eating one cookie from a tin of homemade cookies that was sent by the woman's cousin before she died. As she reaches the end of her cleaning, the speaker takes the last cookie from the tin: "I took it up / and sniffed it, and before eating it, / pressed it against my forehead, because / it seemed like the next thing to do."

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