(for the California Northstate University medical students, class of 2025)

I set containers of gummy Xs and Os
mixed with jellybean hearts
on the tables where you will curl
over new notebooks and fresh pens,
you soon-to-be doctors
writing your art out.

“It’s all about the love,” I say to them—
the gummies and jellies serving as sweet
reminders—and to myself,
“You can’t blow it if you love them,”
as a wise writing woman once told me.

And now I watch you all take to the page,
some of you writing with intensity as a flurry
of words travels from heart to arm to hand
and out through gripped fingers. Some of you
write more slowly, as others pause to consider,
breathe, look up, before applying the pen again.

“The page can take whatever you have to put on it,”
I say. “Get whatever it is out of you and on to paper.”

What I forget to say is that this love infects you
and those around you in the best possible ways, too.

I want to hug each of you and say,
“Physician, love thyself—on the page and in life.”

I want to say, “Show the world the wings
you’ve grown, lifting,
and write your way home.”

•••

(The last stanza quotes two of my favorite poets: the Persian mystic Rumi
as well as the wise writing woman in the poem, Amherst Writers & Artists
founder Pat Schneider.)

(Thanks to Dr. Martin Rubin for inviting me to share the AWA method
with these 14 medical students, just part of the class of 2025.)