From Poetry Heals: Joan Seliger Sidney

From Joan Seliger Sidney:

This past April, National Poetry Month, on a grant from the New Jersey Humanities Council to CavanKerry Press, I led a Poetry Heals workshop in Newark at the University Hospital, UMDNJ.  I wanted to explore with the diverse participants some connections between poetry, medicine and nursing, especially as they related to their work and their lives, so the poems would become a conversation, like they have with their patients.  In addition, I had been asked to focus on “change and loss.”  After reading and discussing a few poems together, Dr. Diane Kaufman wrote her powerful poem, “My Mother Wore Red Lipstick.”

My Mother Wore Red Lipstick

My mother wore red lipstick
A Coco Chanel style suit
I think she knew that she was beautiful
But could have cared less
My mother thought brains were more important than beauty
That a woman should depend on herself and not a man
My mother wrote her life in poetry
Hand typed poems
One hundred each in thirty volumes
Scraps of paper pushed into shoe boxes
I have them all
Too painful to have in the house
I carried them out to the garage
My mother yearned for my father’s love
She never got it in the ways she wanted
He can’t love she told me constantly
Killed in a car accident in 2001
I will forever miss my mother

Diane Kaufman, MD

UMDNJ-Poetry Heals workshop