Poetry Rx

Dear patient,

Your prognosis is unclear. The treatment journey for your chronic illness will be complex. As a start, please add in iron supplements, to improve your energy levels. I am also prescribing some poetry, to fortify your spirit. 

These “prescriptions” are actually, in the main, descriptions. They are not curative; rather, they will anchor and organize your thoughts. But you will discover the value of a vivid word-anchor, on the days when your mind is tempest-tossed by appointments and needles and waitlists and specialists and the unsolicited medical advice of strangers.  

For When You Want to Shout at God for Answers

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

– The Waste Land, TS Eliot

For When Shouting at God Feels Pointless

Ay me, to whom shall I my case complaine,

That may compassion my impatient griefe!

…To heavens? Ah! they, alas! the authors were, 

And workers of my unremedied woe: 

For they foresee what to us happens here, 

And they foresaw, yet suffred this be so.

– The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda, Mary Sidney Herbert

For When You Just Want Your Old Life Back

“But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get.”

– A Grief Observed, CS Lewis

For When You Grieve the Healthy Future You Thought You’d Have

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                      But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

– Four Quartets, TS Eliot

For When You Know, Bone-Deep, the Etymology of “Patient”

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses   

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

…My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.   

– Tulips, Sylvia Plath

For When You Feel Useless to the King and Kingdom

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

– Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent, John Milton

For the Waves of Pain Before the Anesthesia Kicks In

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AI2v5C0Q0s%3Fclip%3DUgkxUwfrcY4xohJLqJxt5yGeVDYoszxSl5op%26clipt%3DENzdChi8sg4

For When You Need the Motherly Mystics

Let nothing disturb you, 

Let nothing frighten you, 

All things are passing away: 

God never changes. 

Patience obtains all things

Whoever has God lacks nothing; 

God alone suffices.

– St. Teresa of Avila

For Every Moment of This Journey

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

– Go to the Limits of Your Longing, Rainer Maria Rilke