One of my jobs as now a faculty member at Harvard Medical
School is to think about the ways in which literary writing
and particularly poetry might serve as a kind of model
or perhaps an instrument for helping medical students
and residents think about empathy and compassion
in their relationships with patients,
and I thought I would read this next poem
as a kind of example of perhaps of what a definition of empathy
might be.
A lot of my colleagues challenge me
first about whether one can even teach empathy,
that that's something that in some sense is unteachable,
and also that it's impossible to define.
And so if you can't define empathy, what is it?
Or how can you teach it?
My response to that is often to say that at least I
know what empathy isn't, and I can certainly
say that many of my experiences in working
with my own supervisors during my own medical training
made me very conscious of the lack of compassion
in medical care.
And, in fact, this next poem was one
that I wrote in response to some of the feedback I had from one
particular supervisor who told me
I tended to identify too strongly with my patients.
And at the time I was actually struggling
with how I could be a more effective witness
to the suffering of my patients.
And so my response to that feedback
was actually to write this poem, so I think in some sense
it is a poem about empathy.
I'll read it and let you judge for yourselves.
It's called "Aida".
And it's from my very first book of poems.
"Aida".
I've never met the guy next door.
I know he's in there, mud caked shoes
outside to dry, the early evening opera.
The glow of candlelight his window trades for night.
I think he's ill since once the pharmacy delivered
his prescriptions to my door, Acyclovir, Dilantin, AZT.
He doesn't go out running anymore.
I've heard that he's a stockbroker who
cheats a little on his taxes.
Not in love they say.
He seems to live alone.
I eat my dinner hovering above my stove
and wondering why haven't we at least exchanged a terse Hello
or shaken hands?
What reasons for the candlelight?
His feet, I'm guessing by his shoes, are small.
I can't imagine more.
I'd like to meet him once outside without apartments,
questions, shoes.
I'd say that I'm in love with loneliness.
I'd sing like candlelight.
I'd sing the blues until we'd finished all the strawberries.
We've never met and yet I'm sure his eyes are generous, alive,
like poetry but melting, brimming with the tears he
cries for all of us.
Aida, me, himself, all lovers who may never meet.
My wall was infinite and kind faced as the wealth
of sharing candlelight.
It falls.