We're fighting for health care and we know you are too! Poetry, in fact, is relevant everywhere,
including policy debates. As the administration and majority party seek to
reverse the progress made, and to remove the protections given Americans by
“Obamacare,” Split This Rock offers 11 poems on matters related to health and
health care.
When we searched our collection
for poems that witness on health or illness, to respond to the current fiasco of
dismantling the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, we found most of the poems on
this theme are by women. Fitting, since the current Senate bill never once
mentions women. The poems range in subject from families living with a son’s mental
illness, to the way chronic pain can govern a life, to how our veterans need
the care our government might soon eliminate - unless we fight!
We hope you will find inspiration for your advocacy work as you resist the draconian and mean-spirited reforms currently under consideration. You might not only read these poems, but use them:
We hope you will find inspiration for your advocacy work as you resist the draconian and mean-spirited reforms currently under consideration. You might not only read these poems, but use them:
●
to help keep yourself grounded
● to open meetings
● to share among discussion
groups, inspire others
● to email to representatives to inspire them to keep working for the health and safety of the people
● or to email to those who need a
reminder of just how much our health is a matter of luck, or class, or
gender, or war.
We offer excerpts of these poems, below, for your hearts and your courage. Click on the title to read the full poem.
For more poems related to matters of health, its economics, and the effects of care, please visit The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
For more poems related to matters of health, its economics, and the effects of care, please visit The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
As I Pay Forty Dollars
By Susan Eisenberg
for my asthma inhaler that
last year cost fifteen
I pause for the mom
whose young son will forget
his inhaler / on the bus /
at his friend’s house /
in the park / at the game /
maybe in his school locker /
somewhere-I-dunno;
Test for Cognitive Function
By Hermine Pinson
Mother
Slipper
July
“I will ask you to recall these words
at the end of our session”
Depression Insists We Stay In
By Katy Richey
You do look fat in those pants,
probably gained twenty pounds
in the last thirty minutes. There’s no parking
within ten blocks of the party.
All the people you hate are already there.
They’re miserable too, but tonight
you won’t be able to tell. They’ll have
green string tied around their middle fingers
and you’re supposed to know why.
in the last thirty minutes. There’s no parking
within ten blocks of the party.
All the people you hate are already there.
They’re miserable too, but tonight
you won’t be able to tell. They’ll have
green string tied around their middle fingers
and you’re supposed to know why.
A Car, A Man, A Maraca
By Charlie Bondhus
At the mirror I heft
elbows, belly, cock,
say hematocrit—44.3; hemoglobin—15.2;
neutrophils—62; monocytes—5.
And Still They Come (for Dr. Sue)
By Gordon Cash
… You make war
On us, ignore or call collateral
The pain and blood of woman-damage left
In all your battles' wakes. And still they come.
The patients come, each seeking her own peace.
On us, ignore or call collateral
The pain and blood of woman-damage left
In all your battles' wakes. And still they come.
The patients come, each seeking her own peace.
By Sheila Black
and in the book the child with the hand reaching out for the water.
invisible hospitals. There were the poor who could be scattered
Dick Cheney’s New Heart Speaks
By Melissa Tuckey
A roadside bomb is planted in every chest
I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man
who had half your brains
but he was good
By Elizabeth Acevedo
… Rob, I am splintered, drawn blood.
We both know
how to slip medicine into milk, how to gift
each other with
our backs. The hundred kinds of get out
someone can
backhand against a name, take them all, palmed,
opened, don't
be afraid that I'll ever try to walk through this door,
because the
surface against my cheek is the only comfort you've shown
me in years.
Oceanside, CA
By Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Balancing on
crutches in the shallows
near her
mother, a girl missing her right lower leg
swings her body
and falls, laughing.
Ode to the Chronically Ill Body
By Camisha Jones
This body is
lightning
Strikes the
same place more than twice
This body is a
fist pounding its
own hand
This body
crumples like paper
I crumple
like paper because of
this body
This body just
wants and wants and wants
from Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography
By Jennifer Bartlett
based on a series of neat errors
falling and catching
to thrust forward
sometimes the body misses
then collapses
sometimes
it shatters
with this particular knowledge
a movement spastic
and unwieldy
is its own lyric
