"The Pediatrician"

The Pediatrician

for Lakshmi Ganapathi (WhatsApp video call, October 19, 2019)


The playground, a pin cushion, needles here,
needles there, stuck in her mind but also
the fun of being children among children,
without a care for streaming, only screaming
their hearts and lungs out in mock threat and fear.
The honest threat struck in an HIV hospice
in India, where as a volunteer she heard
a sex worker her age—eighteen—dying
and the steep silence of the stricken mother
whose ten-year-old just died. Their chronicles
made her resolve to work in global health.
Singapore gave next to no room for it
but corridors of senior doctors screaming
at juniors, or else dropping words like acid.
She saw her self changing, her world contracting
to a conveyor belt, another Yeo’s
packet drink with a well-wrapped plastic straw.
She wanted more, for herself, for her work,
friends who are less, not more and more, like her....

Thanks, Lakshmi, for sharing your stories with me. And thanks, Ian Chung, for publishing the poem in the Eunoia Review. Read rest of poem here.

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