Rachel Kowalsky is a pediatric emergency physician in New York City.
I was a college sophomore when my roommate pressed Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems into my hand, saying, “You will love this.” And, like Katharine Lawrence in her poem “Where Are You, Mary Oliver?” (Intima, Spring 2020), I did. Mary Oliver saw the world with breathtaking clarity and wonder. She listened with her “pen in the air,” she asked what we planned for our “one wild and precious life,” and she promised “you do not have to be good.” I was heartbroken when she died.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we needed her. Where was she? Alarming information flooded my email, constantly upending my train of thought, throwing off the inner calm I’d cultivated over thirteen years in the pediatric emergency department. On a single morning, a revised patient flow algorithm, a guidance document on safe re-use of personal protective equipment, and a foreign press release about dead healthcare workers all landed in my inbox, leaving me short of breath.
But in an online Literature and Medicine group I belong to, colleagues were sharing thoughts that slowed my pulse and cleared my mind. They pointed out that we already have vocabulary for the emotions we were experiencing: fear, hope, doubt, grief. They shared works that made me feel peaceful, even joyful, despite all. I returned to Mary Oliver, who was gone, but lived still in the worn pages of her slim book, marveling at the “green fists of the peonies” and the “wings of the tumbling water,” images of strength and hope. I re-read Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things, with its “day-blind stars waiting with their light,” Ross Gay’s Sorrow is Not My Name, lingering over the agave, the purple okra and the narrator who is not afraid of the skeleton in the mirror. I relished Li-Young Lee’s From Blossoms, drinking in the “laden boughs,” “sweet fellowship in the bins,” and the sugar in the poet’s mouth.” My mother sent me Antonio Machado’s Traveler, there is no Road and I read it like a religious text, “there is no road, you make the road as you go.”
Mary Oliver. As Lawrence, who is an internal medicine physician as well as a poet writes, it was “hard to hear your voice on the empty streets,” and it’s true: hope seemed to have abandoned us. But luckily, you showed us where to look and how. Lawrence continues: “I’m looking to the tree buds to give a sign that better things are emerging.”
Rachel Kowalsky is a pediatric emergency physician in New York City. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the New England Journal of Medicine’s fiction contest. Her work is in The Atticus Review, JMWW Orca, JAMA, and elsewhere.