The top floor—the fourth floor—of the Center for Advanced Medicine, Building B, houses the Renown Institute for Heart and Vascular Health, or to put it simply—cardiology. In fact, the entire top floor is dedicated to cardiology and not a square inch of this space goes unused.
Well, first the poem and then a little context.
Falling Petals; Beating Hearts
Center for Advanced Medicine,
Building B – Early Spring 2022
Cherry blossoms—pink and white—
sway like clouds against the sky,
minding not the plates of rough
gray wrinkled bark from which they spring
They offer no assurances, yet
comfort nonetheless—and thrive
for merest moments, fading back
like apparitions in the sun.
Beneath them hearts that have endured
too much to bear beat slowly by
as here and there a petal drops
and flutters lightly to the ground.
They enter at a door that leads
four floors above this transient ring
of urgent color, beckoning
for but the slightest hint of cheer.
So, this is a sakura poem. If I write nothing else in a year, I’ll always strive hard to pull of at least a sakura poem in the spring. It’s always a challenge to dream up new contexts, circumstances, and metaphors to connect to these remarkable trees.
As I post this, it’s the middle of Summer. I’ve been busy with my new job, which has me stationed at the location in question, and tired—always so damned tired. I won’t go into the nature of the job in this post, but I’m enjoying it and I really like the people I work with and around.
So the inspiration for this poem came as I showed up and left from work amid a parking lot full of cherry blossoms in all stages of bloom—a fairly even distribution of both wild cherry (Prunus avium) and Japanese cherry (Prunus serrulata)—that completely encircle the long wide building. Having researched Japanese cultural connections to the cherry blossom (sakura) in the past, I found their juxtaposition to a building full of medical offices that deal with life-threatening conditions striking, fitting, and moving all at once. And so the first lines came to mind, which I later expanded upon.
My wife’s cardiologist is on this floor—the irony of my ending up employed here is not lost on me. I see him in the halls with some regularity. The first time we went to see him, following up from her multiple admissions for supraventricular tachycardia as she gradually succumbed to her as-yet undiagnosed refeeding syndrome, it was early spring and the blossoms were in bloom.
I wanted to write a poem about them then—her heart rate reached in excess of 240bpm, like the flutter of a cherry blossom in the wind—but our struggle with her cancer loomed large in mind and there wasn’t much mental space for that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll still find myself exploring this metaphor as that nightmare moves further into the distance. Thus far, four and a half years later, she has returned to near-normal health—and that damned cancer is still gone.
