The Poet's Pledge

A while ago there was a poetry contest involving poems about medicine and physicians.  I did not enter the contest but started thinking of an oath poets might take.  The first line occurred to me and then I finally got around to writing a poem.  (I found out that the phrase "first, do no harm" does not actually appear in the Hippocratic oath, but everyone thinks it does, so I kept the first line.)


    

                                The Poet’s Pledge

                                                         after Hippocrates

                                            First, do some harm.
                                            Rip out your reader’s heart
                                            and put it where she thought
                                            her brain belonged.
                                            Reroute some neurons
                                            and make him smell a sunset,
                                            taste the wave’s roar,
                                            and see the shape
                                            of a sparrow’s song.

                                            Next, turn the rest of the world
                                            upside down and inside out
                                            so skyscrapers become
                                            stalactites in the earth’s core,
                                            the stars drown in the sea,
                                            dolphins swim the sky,
                                             and one man’s ceiling
                                             becomes some woman’s floor.

                                             And finally, make us see
                                             this is the way things
                                             already were
                                             and always should be.