Poetry by William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition Winner Nikita Raman

Celebrating poetry and poets is a longstanding tradition at Northeast Ohio Medical University, which recently held its 37th annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition – a contest that nearly 400 students in medical schools across the country entered.

The top three student winners (Sophia Valesca Gorgens from Emory University, Kaveh Danesh from the University of California San Francisco and Nikita Raman from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine) visited the University this spring.

The guest student poets spoke to NEOMED students about their winning poems and read selections of their work; and guest physician-writer Mikkael Sekeres, M.D., from the Cleveland Clinic, talked to the group about what writing means to him.

Here’s the poem that won the third-place award. Its author, Nikita Raman, also won an honorable mention for a second poem she entered.

The night the Queens sky exploded

By Nikita Raman

bursting hot electric blue
as though an infant
had bottled the daytime
and upended it into the dark

I stood with you on the fire escape,
gaping at the spectacle.

You said to me

the Earth will tell you when she is in pain.
When a child is gut-punched
by a bigger, nastier child,
her stomach does not sound
the broken wails of indignity.
The moans come out
through shaking lips,
a whole body away from the bruise.
Cuts from Dakota oil spills
burst power transformers across the Queens sky.
Fracking drills radiate through shrieking nerves
to our children’s rainwater.

You said to me

we are fools not to listen
when the Earth herself crumbles.
Do not marvel, shell-shocked, at her pain.
You are not helpless to fix it.
Hear her. Heal her. Kneel in the dirt,
press your ear to the ground. Look,
and do not look away.
Grasp her hand. Tell her you feel
her worlds of hurt,
her strength through a thousand indignities.
Cry with her. Offer your forearms
for the Earth to hold
with her shaky wrists.
Help her rise from the shattered floor.

 

You asked of me

Doctor,
Is healing not your oath?