DEAR RESCUE WORKER | Joan Roger
9/14/01
You are doing a very good job,
the author writes, underlining
the word “good” with two bold strokes.
Each word, carefully crafted in pencil
by the hands of a five or six-year-old,
is written on wide-lined kindergarten paper
with alternating solid and dashed lines.
I hope you find more people in the debris.
His letter hangs on the hospital wall
well after a time when we knew
there would be no others.
You are very nice to do what you are doing,
he prints in the center of the page
over-erased pencil smudging.
Then his small hands must’ve rubbed the backside
of the paper with a glue stick
and pressed his words onto another piece
of construction paper.
And thank you for helping out, he closes,
before a simple valediction and his printed name.
The letter is made in the shape of a paper person.
A circular face is pasted along the top margin,
eyes drawn with black marker, a bell-shaped nose,
a smile outlined with red Crayola lips.
Two hands are traced, perhaps the child’s very own,
then cut out and glued to project from both the right
and left sides of the page.
Two hands reaching into the air.
Joan Roger is a poet and physician who resides in the Pacific Northwest where she writes and practices medicine. In 2023, Roger earned her MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Through writing, she has begun to find a voice for her experience of working at Ground Zero on September 11th, 2001, when she was a third-year emergency medicine doctor-in-training at Bellevue Hospital. Roger has published poems in The Healing Muse, The Human Touch, Thimble Magazine, Intima, Canary Magazine, and The 2023 One Page Poetry Anthology. Roger is working on a collection of poems about being a medical worker during the 9/11 tragedy.