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MERI Center Blog

August 27, 2020
SMS Meeting Poems
Resilience/Wellbeing

It’s been too long since we have last posted to this blog.  The summer, even during the pandemic, diverted our attention. New workshops, writing a paper, focusing on the future and how we will mold it to our vision.  And a fear that I personally was using it as a platform for my agenda, my beliefs, my pain.  It can be a fine line of representing an organization and misrepresenting your own beliefs as the organization’s.   But I realize that not focusing on the blog was a mistake.   So I, we, will make an effort to post regularly. 

To start our renewed efforts, I end with a poem that Dr. Rabow read at yesterday's Symptom Management Service meeting, one that is particularly powerful as we contineu to fight against racial injustice.

 

Absolute
by Jacqueline Woodson

The summer I was ten a teenager named Kim butterflied my hair. Cornrows curling into braids behind each ear.

Everybody’s wearing this style now, Kim said.

Who could try to tell me I wasn’t beautiful. The magic in something as once ordinary as hair that for too long had not been good enough now winged and amazing now connected

to a long line of crowns.

Now connected to a long line of girls moving through Brooklyn with our heads

held so high, our necks ached. You must know this too – that feeling

of being so much more than you once believed yourself to be

so much more than your too-skinny arms and too-big feet and too-long fingers and too-thick and stubborn hair

All of us now suddenly seen the trick mirror that had us believe we weren’t truly beautiful suddenly shifts

and there we are

and there we are

and...

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May 20, 2020
SMS Meeting Poems
Resilience/Wellbeing

Today's poem was written & read by Dr. Tom McNalley and was one of the award winning poems from the UCSF Department of Medicine Shelter-in-Poetry contest.

The Things We Bear Alone

Some things were not made to be borne alone:
the impossible dance of Anna’s hummingbird
returned to the nectar of the crimson snapdragon,
the surprise of the first scent of night jasmine,
the circle dance of the bluebird pair, side-looking,
honeybees chanting over new lavender,
sounding their Om resonant into the garden.

These things we were made to bear together:
to hold our gaze to the beauty that breaks our hearts
for even as it enters into us,
we cannot embrace it all.