Volume 16 Number 3, SPRING 1999

Poets at Work

Spurred by a contest, poetry is emerging from the medical center's staff, students and faculty. Here we offer two of the winners.

Now the Body

Half in pain, vowing

To speak again, she imagines

The matter's cause: numb

Stumbles from a life

Of trails, her limbs run

Thin. I used them

Rough she says, twisting

For photographs

Jumbling the hospital bed:

A Girl Scout squinting

From slopes of rock; a hairy

hiker in a sling

of rope; a woman

spidering

wilderness.

Now the body

braces not to bend,

legs tangled, a mess,

her mouth

a blur of pink,

keen to talk

as the morphine settles:

I had

the prettiest knees in New York...

remembering Central

Park, and a bridge

Where she could sit

For hours,

swinging her feet to a chorus of grins.

FEYZA MAROUF

Heme/Onc

That week I wished for a little more heme and a little less onc

The crazy cells of your body that caused the crazy labs that I followed

Each morning

Well night really

Since it was still dark when I pushed your curtain aside to see you

And your mom curled spoon-style

Your bloated body under her worried hand

And decided not to wake you up just so I could write

"Regular rate and rhythm" in your chart when what was wrong

Could best be seen in your marrow under a beam of light

Or at least in the light of day when your seven-year-old body hunched

its way to the hospital fountain

To sail your boat

And I just couldn't watch you "play"

So I played with your potassium and other lytes

And did the other things one does as an inexperienced doctor

in the dark

And waited for your death

To stand beside the team that played only defense to your disease

As they stood in a half-circle remembering you

And your lizard toys

And tried very hard not to think of other seven-year-old boys.

ELIANA M. PERRIN

THE POEM BY Feyza Marouf, a second-year Stanford medical student, won first place in the medical center's third annual poetry contest. The poem by Eliana Perrin, a pediatric resident, won second place. Development officer Michael Welch wrote a poem that took third place. Honorable mention went to Robert Peisch, research assistant in genetics; and Patrick Finley, an employee at UCSF.

THE CONTEST IS ORGANIZED BY Marian Slattery, a technician in the hospital's transfusion service, and is sponsored by the Employee Events Committee.