I must speak to you
as you sink
into the contours
of the dusk, beside me.
Desperate rain pounds
the windscreen. Yellow
streaks leap suddenly up
from the glazed sheets
of black road ahead.
Lightning wounds
the sky, spastic,
combed
with bludgeoning
booms.
Yet I feel
that you really know
how much I’ve needed
to share with you
my love.
Gene Hirsch is a retired academic geriatrician who, for many years, has taught human values in patient care to medical students and doctors, recently at a hospice, with dying people.
He initiated and has taught in the writing program at John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC, since 1992, when he co-founded NC Writers' Network West. He conducts seminars on subjects such as Expressing Human Need and Emotion, The Influence of Existential Meaning for the Poet.
Gene's poetry has been published in medical and non-medical journals such as: Pharos (Medical Honor Society), Journal of the American Medical Society, Consortium Ethics Program, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Fetishes (Univ. of Colorado), Hiram Poetry Review, Human Quest, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Anthologies include Atahita Journal, Blood & Bone (poems by physicians), Behavioral Medicine, Crossing Limits (Afro-American and Jewish poets), Tyranny of the Normal, and Echoes across the Blue Ridge. He produced five volumes of Freeing Jonah (poets of western NC). He is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.
