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  1. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
  2. Medicine and Meaning
  3. Elegy

Elegy

By Robert Adam Heifetz

When the night is young, the moon will never fall
or sunrise into day
and for a moment, my thoughts are whole
yet rarely do they stay

Dreams meander the stage, like swans negotiate a sinuous stream
the daylight glistening on their napes and coverts
then lost to the pitter-patter of broken thoughts

And where have they gone, my setting sun, 
now that your light has gone?
To hear their music, and to dance its waltz!
I am lulled like a seaman to the rocks and cliffs

There I sit, as one day bleeds into another
until the dew is draped, iridescent, by the sun’s rising curtain 
And I am reborn in so many ways

Hushed, a morning greets no anvil chorus 
And through the beats of silence, an audience pickets
like old habits bickering into the night
Again, to our mountains we shall return!

Daylight, erstwhile, sirens its own tune of possibility

Now here lies my mind, benumbed,
instrument without a frequency to coalesce

Into a nature’s cenotaph, so too for all that is bright
I cry for a shadow that never was
Lost, forgotten,
what could be

And in my reflection drip a million lonesome tears,
Filling the pits of a once fruitful garden

They race, as they fall for no one but themselves,
The knowledge of what was,
splattering seeds of opportunity.

Robert Heifetz, D.O., is a second year Family Medicine Resident at UAMS-West in Fort Smith, Arkansas. His creative writing was developed long before entering Medical School. He grew up in a creative household: his father a mathematician and aspiring painter, his mother with a formal music composition background. They both encouraged his creative pursuits from an early age and he is very grateful for this.

Posted on October 4, 2021

Filed Under: 4 - Poetry

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