Making Sense of Suffering Through Poetry

Day 52/365 - Blocking
Originally uploaded by tobi.lowrance

Beth Lown, MD, is a renaissance woman. An internist at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA, she’s also a teacher, a researcher and a writer, and not only an academic writer, but a poet as well. She started writing poetry in 1977 when she was an intern. I know her well through her work as a board member of the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center and a member of the executive committee. She has been an active ambassador for the Center and compassionate health care in general and was a finalist for the Schwartz Center Compassionate Caregiver Award ® in its inaugural year.

I just found out that her beautiful poem Leylo and the Land Mine won the Annals of Internal Medicine’s best poem of 2009, and was published in the journal last summer. The poem describes a Somalian woman Beth saw in her clinic only once. She never actually saw her patient’s face because she was veiled. The poem is about Beth’s effort to imagine this patient’s experience and to empathize with her suffering.

Beth told me that she writes poetry for many reasons – to make sense of the experience of illness and the role of the physician, and to remember, memorialize and celebrate the lives of her patients and all they have taught her.

Let me know what you think of the poem.

Leylo and the Land Mine *

An ebony leg leaned
against the clinic wall,
snow melting
on its sandal-clad foot.
The rest of her sat
on the exam table,
a thin, dark,
discontinuous girl.
Metal fragments
studded her x-rays,
shining like
a brilliant galaxy.

Above the veil
her eyes scanned mine,
as I wondered how
to understand that moment
when hope exploded
and her toes bloomed
like bloody flowers
in the trees of her distant
Somalian village.

I should ask Beth to contribute to the Schwartz Center’s compassionate tweets. Every Monday through Friday we’re tweeting inspirational quotes about compassion. Sign up for our compassionate tweets @ kschwartzcenter and feel free to contribute.


*Beth Lown, Leylo and the Land Mine. Ann Intern Med July 7, 2009 151:62