How Your Skin Tells Your Story: A Poem
In the March 3, 2010 issue of JAMA, there is a poem by Sarah Wells called “Hymn of Skin.” While I enjoyed the whole poem, my favorite part is:
Plastic surgeon of the heavens, how I delight
in a furrowed brow, crow’s feet, age spots—
wrinkle me up a dozen times to show I lived
hard, good, funny—after all beauty, being what it is,is only skin deep—may my soul seep through
dry scales of later hands, resting tranquil in my lap.
O omniscient dermatologist, what ingenuity,
past hurts evident in scrapes and scars—a clumsy stumble down uneven concrete stairs,
knees and ankle raw and dripping; pockmarked cheeks
from teenage zits—all healed, in the end, but not forgotten.
How often we need reminders of where we’ve been.
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
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