It’s poetry month and we asked our community to answer 3 important questions, one of them being…
What poem do you recite to yourself when you’re waiting for test results in a doctor’s waiting room?
Here are some of the answers we got.
Danny Shot
Poet
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality…
-Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”
Holly Metz, Writer &
Teresa Carson, Poet and CavanKerry Associate Editor
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
-Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come”
Irene L. Wells
Executive Assistant, New Jersey State Council on the Arts
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul...
Mary Rizzo
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and Associate Director of Digital and Public Humanities Initiatives in American Studies and History
Rutgers, Newark
You soda crackers! I remember
when I arrived here in the rain,
whipped out and alone.
How we shared the aloneness
and quiet of this house…
-Raymond Carver, “Soda Crackers”
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Poet
From Boostan-e Sa’di, by Sa’di of Shiraz, 13th century Iran
A champion one night could not fall asleep.
A local doctor diagnosed his pains,
“Insofar as he ingested leaves
from the vines proliferating here, I’ll be
surprised if he survives to see the sunrise.
Tatar arrows lodged deep within your breast
will prove less painful than consuming food
not well-suited to your digestion’s ‘taste.’
Let one bite become twisted in your bowels,
and it will bring to nothing your whole life!
That same night the doctor died. Forty years
have passed. The champion is alive and well.
—translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman (with G. M. Wickens)
Jack Ridl
Poet
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
Holly Smith
Writer
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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