Patient
Patient
Patient
Did you read that as patient, or patient?
Probably patient.
No one has been patient with you –had patience for you– in quite some time.
It sounds nice, though.
What do you think it might be like?
Well, you can’t just stand there;
You need to get going!
The list, ever-growing…
Your patient, your team; you’re needed in the next room.
I asked my patient for her thoughts.
No, she sighed.
No one has been very patient with her, either.
I know what you’re thinking, but not that one
Not the one with nails in his palms
A stone bed in the hillside
Tangled brown hair and olive skin
Our man has a buzz cut and a gurney
Broken bone at his temple held
Together with staples
He is not waiting to be bathed
With oil and the hair of women
Knotted in grief
His skin is already damp
With the spray of formaldehyde
From industrial plastic bottles
He is not laying in a closed tomb
Where even the air
May forget to breathe
But in an old basement lab
Warm with the odors
Of thirty medical students
He is not the one who sweat blood
Alone with the bent trees
And a tired moon
Yet he too lets us take him apart
Hoping to make our hands more gentle
For the patients that follow
