To a Body Donor
There is still a silence, just for a moment,
when we approach you. The skin on your shins
has become thin, like Bible paper,
and young women you have never met
handled you gently like a borrowed thing
to give you back to yourself
when they were done. Through curtains
of bone and muscle, in our hands
your heart saw light as though it had just been born,
new to our sight, and yet we do not know
if you wore glasses or had a sweet tooth.
With every cut, you depart from us,
and what we learn of you cannot hold
your interest, cannot compare to the astonishment
you see behind the blinded blue of your eyes.
Adam Lalley is a physician in New York City. He is a winner of the Michael E. DeBakey Poetry Award and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition. His writing has appeared in ACEP Now, The Healing Muse, STAT, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.
This poem was originally published in the Fall 2020 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine (www.theintima.org).
Adam Lalley MD
Such a moving tribute to those individuals who have offered their bodies for medical research and education. The sensitivity and respect shown in the poem speaks to the writer’s character and skill.
Dear Dr. Lalley. Thank you for the lovely submission. I love how the poem pays homage to people who donate their bodies to science. And I also love how it captures the “sense of awe” that medical students often feel when handling a cadaver. The first stanza ends with the notion of skin as “Bible paper”….I love this: the comparison awakens our senses that something “spiritual” is happening. The second stanza is just genius. “Handled… Read more »
Thank you so much for your thoughts. I wrote this poem in my first year of medical school at the Zucker School of Medicine. Divided into pre-assigned groups of 4 or 5 students, we were entrusted with the care and study of the same body donor over the course of our entire first year, when we would revisit our donor periodically in the same groups to explore different anatomical systems. At the end of the… Read more »