Christian Detisch
Blessed are they who believe they suffer
your justice. In the ICU a woman said,
"I'm being punished." A silence nested there
until a nurse set down a paper cup of meds

and asked, "From one to ten, where is your pain?"
then turned to raise the question of my belonging,
a familiar sting. "Oh, I'm just the chaplain,"
I shrugged. The nurse said, "Thanks for visiting,"

although at three a.m. I feel I'm more raccoon
—with questions curious as paws—
than brother to these patients, for whom the moon
seems closer company than either me or God.

To know them more I read the doctors' notes,
the language like an alien's, unclarified,
with words I squint to follow as through a telescope:
"Pt tachycardic but afebrile thru the night... "

And yet, I click NEW NOTE and start my own:
"Pt says she's struggling with God."
I chart it, pained to see it written down,
and fear I've represented the façade

and not the living space of her complaint,
which I hear as: "I'm alone in my own grief."
My face is brushed in blue computer light,
burning in the same cool flame that wreathed

the bush where Moses heard you speak, alone
—though I am met with only the dim stillness
of these rooms in which no one feels at home
but you, Lord, whose silence lingers like an illness.
from the journal IMAGE
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Checkov said that medicine was his lawful wife, writing his mistress—how acutely I’ve felt the same sense of art’s illicit pleasures, in contrast to my more public calling....I’ve felt the same temptation (or need?) to bifurcate my life in a similar fashion. But chaplaincy, like poetry, requires absolutely everything—which is to say, not the exhaustion of one’s self, but the integration of it. This poem is an attempt to claim both modes of devotion, to be one person.
Image of the frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects
"Phillis Wheatley: The Unsung Black Poet"
 
"While many New Englanders took note of the poet's gifts, no American printer would publish a book by a Black writer. Poems on Various Subjects was eventually financed by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and published in London. As a 19-year-old in 1773, Phillis travelled to the city, escorted by the Wheatleys' son. She was an instant sensation."

via BBC
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Color image of the cover of Marianne Boruch's latest book, Bestiary Dark
What Sparks Poetry:
Marianne Boruch on "So we get there just as"

"Words came later, by accident in a silent room at a desk. But back there, one afternoon in that desolate expanse my husband and I and a stranger, the three of us came together over that creature stricken by a fellow human we desperately wanted to disown, a driver hot to desecrate the planet. I can’t tell you the rage in me as that car grew smaller and smaller then slipped into nothing’s pure distance."
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