By Michael Salcman
There’s nothing as beautiful as a marina at dawn
the clacking of ducks
the sky clearing away
the remnants of a storm:
A silvery sky
and a breeze sun-filled
and warm
the steel halyards at rest
from beating on mast and boom
the loom of shadows withdrawing
from the wheel
in the cockpit
the city awakening too soon
like a cat in search of a meal.
The cabins in my sailboat line up
like the lenses in a telescope
the rays of the rising sun
pricking through
from back to front
finally reach into the bow
warming the V-berth
and wake me to the morning.
The tide runs low—
soon there will be
dock hands on the dock boards
and halyards stamping in a stronger breeze
carrying the smell of coffee
and the children asleep below
who won’t yet feel or know
the wonder of the world.
Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio.
His poems have appeared in many medical/literary journals (JAMA, Chest, Ars Medica, Blood & Thunder, Caduceus, Healing Muse, Hektoen, Hospital Drive) and less bloody venues like Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan and Smartish Pace.
His books include The Clock Made of Confetti; The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical matters (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize); and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize in 2020. Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published in 2022.