Dreesen Letter to the Editor
Published on Jan 15, 2023
To the Editor:
Poetry is dead? No way. I’m a trauma surgeon. I know what’s dead when I see it.
A year or two ago, I stood with my team in the emergency room awaiting the arrival of a severely injured patient. Our chaplain was there, as usual, and we chatted about an essay that I’d read on the Poetry Foundation website about chaplaincy and poetry. She’d already heard about it from another hospital chaplain.
Our nurse leader chimed in. “I love that site,” he said. “I get their poem of the day.”
Then the injured person showed up. We stopped chatting and went to work, inspired by our unexpected connection in poetry, which is definitely not dead.
Elizabeth Dreesen
Chapel Hill, NC