Why I Write (Poetry)

It's 1958. I'm seven—reading Scholastic Magazine, intrigued by the page of poems, children's ditties. The words are not aligned in paragraphs but stand alone in shorter lines. The lines sometimes rhyme and have a rhythm different from what I'm used to hearing, though I couldn't then articulate it that way. There are many surprises. I am looking at every word in a new way. Take one word out, the poem crumbles like a game of Jenga. This sounds like the same language in which I'm told to pick up my things—but it's different. Very different. This language has a magic. Equally intriguing, the ages of authors are listed: John Somebody, age eight, Caroline, age eleven. Children like me had written these incantations. If they had, so could I! So I began to play with words as I played with toys, and sometime in the next year I, too, had my first publication. What I take from this memory: magic and permission.

It's 2008 (a few years later). I'm on a train coming back from a child psychiatry meeting in Washington D.C. I was not writing poetry at this point in my life, but in the last month or two had noticed random phrases, fragments, and lines accumulating in my appointment book, in the margins of my patient notes, in my telephone log. I had given little attention to these fragments until that train ride. From the window passing the demarcated farm fields of rural Maryland or New Jersey, I began to jot down similar fragments as I imagined a giant jogging alongside the train, leaping from field to field. The rhythm of the train and the rhythm of the appearance of these fields must have helped the fragments form into lines and the lines into—a poem! After more than twenty years of my not writing poetry or fiction, a poem appeared. I looked at it in recognition of a long lost friend, one on whose face is recognized both the person of youth and the person of today. I felt, at that moment, a keen sense of a calling, a remembered calling. As much as I was “called” to be a physician,