And through this poem, I am vouchsafed to know it.įor the past six months, trainees in St James’ Hospital have had the opportunity to consider (and compose) poetry, prose and song as part of a narrative medicine group run by a kindly consultant. And hopeful, because I too was alive in the blizzard of that blossoming pear. Lullaby, because the right lyric can feel like a chord, played on your instrument brain. It may well be the last poem he ever wrote. Haunted, because it was written by a man hounded to his death in a Siberian gulag. This poem rings through my head, a haunted hopeful lullaby. It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird cherry tree. “And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
