“Expressive writing promotes both spiritual and physical healing,” according to Dr. David Watts, Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and his wife Dr. Joan Baranow, Associate Professor of English at Dominican University.
“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” wrote the iconic physician-poet William Carlos Williams.
In my native language Shona, a popular aphorism advises “seka urema wafa.” Roughly translated, it means “laugh at a cripple when you are dead.” In Shona, idioms like this are called tsumo.
As is usual practice at the Multi-Service Center, a homeless shelter in the heart of San Francisco, I was sent out to recruit patients from the men’s floor.
Last night I was called
to the front lines
where life and death battle it out
and no one ever knows
who will stay, who will go
or what, in the end, it’s really all about
