He desires no other paradise than existence.” (The Morning of Acmeism) Osip Mandelstam, the poet whose poem I have been tracking in this piece once wrote: “To exist is the artist’s greatest pride. (“What is truth?”) It was as if to alleviate its burden, he renamed the weight of this work we do as gravity: an awesome force for which we bear no personal responsibility, but to which we cannot but be responsive. It felt like an acknowledgement of something that both was and wasn’t true. We unpacked this in appreciative silence. Questions that cannot be answered really ask but one thing: can you face them, or do you turn away? We approach our interviews with multiaxial inventories and diagnostic criteria and think we control the narrative but the stories we unspool often ask such unanswerable questions of us:Īt a teaching session recently, another kindly consultant passed this parcel on to a roomful of trainees: “You are not responsible for the existence of the patients you meet.” What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? How, I wonder? Were they buried? Burned? Were there ashes? Should we have been compelled to wear them on our foreheads? Should we not sprinkle these stories into our water supply, fertilise our crops with them, so that we can recognize the taste of who we surely, truly are? The stories contributed to the Mother & Baby home commission were destroyed, we now know. We knock, and stories of selves come unspooling through doors like a red, broken carpet. And it should never cease to amaze that as doctors, we but ask and oh! we receive. Let me try to say what I mean: each one of us at all times carries ourselves coiled up in story. It’s been a good time, and a worthy exercise in considering an idea often expressed but rarely explored: that the practice of medicine is art as much as science that there is meaning to be mined in what we do that it is helpful to be articulate about this.

And through this poem, I am vouchsafed to know it.įor the past six months, trainees in St James’ Hospital have had the opportunity to consider (and compose) poetry, prose and song as part of a narrative medicine group run by a kindly consultant. And hopeful, because I too was alive in the blizzard of that blossoming pear. Lullaby, because the right lyric can feel like a chord, played on your instrument brain.

It may well be the last poem he ever wrote. Haunted, because it was written by a man hounded to his death in a Siberian gulag. This poem rings through my head, a haunted hopeful lullaby. It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird cherry tree. “And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

In loving memory of images