A portrait of the nurse as a poet

One Notebook

A few weeks after my patient died, I dug out my old poetry notebook. In a short, simple poem, I wrote what it was like for her to die—how her family hadn’t gotten there in time, how alike our lives were, how thin the line between patient and nurse, and how final her dying was. Writing about her death, I felt a sudden, inexplicable joy. I had, in words, captured her last moment forever. She would, in this poem, be forever in my life. But I had also, in writing, let her go. I had forgiven her for dying and forgiven myself for not being able to save her, for not being able to save most of my patients. In the poem, I came to terms with my own mortality. I had been there for her last breath; someday, some nurse would be there for my last breath. From that moment on, my work in nursing became, more and more, the subject of my poems. My poems became like nurses, healing me and at the same time documenting my patient’s lives in transformative ways. Poems taught me that I did make a difference in my patients’ lives.

All nurses understand that much of what they do, their best work, is done in secret. A nurse and a patient are often alone. There are meds and treatments to give, catheters to be changed and IVs to unplug, heart rates to monitor and pump settings to adjust. But all of these are only excuses for nurses to have contact with their patients—to talk to them, to touch them, to listen to them, to be with them. Nurses and patients share a thousand invisible moments; it is those important moments that both nurse and patient remember.

I remember once when I was the patient, rushed in for emergency surgery. What I recall most vividly is the way the nurse held my hand while she asked her hurried questions. She didn’t let go, steadying me, until they rolled me away on the gurney to the OR—that human contact held me together. A friend of mine remembers how a nurse came into his hospital room where he lay, sweating and restless with fever. Silently, the nurse gathered water and washcloths and stayed with him, cooling his forehead, his neck, his arms. They never spoke, but he told me that he’d never felt more caring, more loved, in his life. When he bumped into her months later at a store, he burst into tears.

His tears were like my poems. They gave witness, gave voice to the way the nurses held onto to us, supported us by doing nothing heroic or technical, but by performing compassionate deeds that no one else witnessed, moments that weren’t recorded in the chart and didn’t show up on the hospital bill. Like my friend’s tears, my poems about my nursing interactions with patients make those invisible moments visible and real. Poems capture those times and hold them in place; at the same time, they allow us to burrow beneath the surface of the moment, transporting us beyond the individual experience to universal truths about life, suffering and death. When I learned how poetry is like nursing and how nursing is like poetry—how both can change the world, how both can heal and touch the deepest part of us—I was hooked. Ever since I wrote that simple poem about my dying patient, I haven’t had one career—I’ve had two.

Writing and reading poetry, with its attention to detail and language, helps me be a better nurse. Because I have learned how to read poems on two levels, slick surface and deep metaphor, I can hear the story behind the patient’s words. Because poems (the good ones, anyway) are mysterious and transcendent, I have learned to be alert to the many holy moments that occur in caregiving and to accept them without embarrassment or doubt.

Being a nurse helps me be a better poet. Because I am alert to the body’s messages, I can allow my poems to be sensual, replete with sights and sounds and smells, with cries of suffering or songs of joy. Because, as a nurse, I am engaged in the very human activity of caring for others, I can pour that reality into poems, grounding what I do in the real world and, at the same time, allowing what I do to be creative and open to imagination. In poems, I can change the endings that I cannot change in the hospital. In the hospital, I can encourage patients to talk to me, creating, in a sense, their own poems, a space in which to place their lives and their fears.

In my best poems, in my best nursing moments, poetry and caregiving merge, doing the important work of paying attention, accepting, releasing and healing.

Everything in Life Is Divided

Everything in life is divided:
twenty-four hours that fade from day to night,
the sand at Martha’s Vineyard, where we vacationed last year,
separating us from the ocean
where we swam, then returned to our blanket,
the two of us making one marriage,
sharing the apple sliced to reveal the identical
black seeds of its surprised face.
Even our bodies can be halved, although less evenly:
lungs partitioned into lobes, the heart’s blood
pumped from right to left, the brain’s two hemispheres
directing our arms, our legs,
our lives into the two possibilities of the Greek mask.
My life’s work, too, is divided—
on one side of my desk, unfinished poems;
on the other, nursing books with dog-eared pages.
Aren’t we all somehow divided?
Like when my daughter was in labor, my first
grandchild emerging into the room’s blue air,
suddenly entering new territory,
and how, when after the delivery my daughter kept bleeding,
I couldn’t look at the newborn in the incubator
but stood fast beside my child, the woman who once
slipped from my life into her own and now had divided herself again
while I balanced in my hands Joy and Fear, cradling them both
until the bleeding stopped.

From Leopold’s Maneuvers, a collection of poetry by Cortney Davis (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)