Poet – Marilyn McEntyre

You know what to do. You step up.
You step in. Sometimes
you don’t ask. You just act.
In the ICU, in the icy street,
you watch. You’ve seen
more harm than most.
You know how death may
come in the thick of things,
how utterly one moment
may be divided from the next
by a bullet, a cry, a breath.
Prone in the snow,
your voice is silent now.
Hands that moments ago reached
to shield a stranger are still,
the scrubs you wore yesterday
laundered, folded and waiting.
Someone else will take your shift today.
MCM

About Marlyn McEntyre, PhD

Marilyn McEntyre has taught American Literature,  medical humanities, and writing in the healthcare professions at UC Davis and the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. Marilyn is a well regarded author, speaker, and poet. Her interests lie in connections between spirituality, language, and healing the earth and each other. Her book Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out explores “how poetry written by patients can offer insights for caregivers and medical professionals, focusing on the subjective experience of illness, including pain, altered self-perception, and the search for meaning.”