A Collaborative Poem
By Listener Poets & The Good Listening Project Community
Giving Tuesday – November 2023
This month we loved receiving an outpouring of your deepest hopes for the future of healthcare. We hope you enjoy seeing how our communal "Poem for Our Future" reveals our shared dreams.
Working together with a shared vision binds us in a collective endeavor to change our healthcare system. Thank you for co-creating this vision. Please feel free to download and share the PDF here or read the full poem below.
We received so many amazing submissions for this collaborative poem! If you’re interested in reading everyone’s hopes for the future of healthcare, please download the unabridged version here, which includes all 55+ responses woven together.
Poem for Our Future
By Listener Poets & The Good Listening Project Community
Sit with me among the oceans and forests,
among the ghosts of our ancestors.
It is time to plant the intention
to nurture our truest nature –
a flourishing society creating
a more caring place for us all where
we
matter.
Our health. Our abilities.
Our stories. Our goals.
Our humanity
restored.
Honest conversations.
No longer leading separate lives, instead
intertwined with roots of empathy and peace
healing our histories, systems, bodies
willing to make change.
Where equity is de facto,
a sunlight rising with respect
shining, our highest aims aligned
with treating people, not conditions –
understanding each person’s fruitful story,
denying no one the care they need.
Attention to prevention
pulling weeds putting
people over profits,
a healing process treating
root causes, creating
a seamless experience
available for every person,
regardless of income.
A future with assurance where
we will unify –
heal you,
heal me.
No more waiting.
Cure, share, explore.
Garden ways of old
with technology of new
as we struggle body and mind
to forget the language we have learned.
To accept with compassion
all patients will die.
May we mourn their losses well.
Speak of the creation we ache for –
two-way
human to human care.
Guided, blossoming gently as we sit lovingly
with our own mortality.
May we take ourselves for walks.
Drink enough water to nourish our cells.
May we allow ourselves to cry,
dew tears of healing.
May we feel every soul.
May the moments of silence,
the systoles and diastoles of our conversations
in relationship to earth and seasons,
position us to hear what
hearts are trying to tell
for a chance to belong
to our shared humanity.
Open hearts
let love do its work.