Poem for Our Future

Listener Poets & The Good Listening Project Community

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.

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

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.

More Poems & Stories

Re-set

"I grew from the experience – though I think it aged me 10 years!" This is how a resident described a turning point with a specific patient when he recognized how burned out he was.

Words of Silver

Although he had been through many stressful experiences in his life and recently, he always held onto his positive outlook. He took particular care to use words intentionally, paying attention to their connotations, so that his positivity extended to those that he interacted with as well.

In the Cath Lab

“I’ve always loved hearts,” she said. She was a cardiac nurse who had been drawn to a job in the catheterization laboratory. “It’s so rare to have an opportunity to immediately do something good for somebody, but it happens often in the cath lab,” she told me.

The Good Listening Project - Frankie Abralind - PPE poem.jpg

PPE

She was tired after working twelve straight days on her current rotation. It was her third year of medical school, and she was already feeling burnt out. “I have five more years like this,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘Keep pushing, you can get through it,’ but I don’t know if I can.”

Skin

He had been thinking a lot about race over the past several months. He’s a White man with two children: a 20-year-old biological son who is White, and an 18-year-old adopted daughter who is Black.

Shield to Kindness

“I have a lot of unresolved grief,” she confessed. It was her grief that made her good at empathizing with the hospice community she served. “Would resolving my grief make me less effective with my patients?”

True Friendship

She immediately knew that she didn’t want her poem to be about cancer. She wanted it to be about friendship and asked if she could share a recent story.

the strongest creature

Being in healthcare can be extremely rewarding, but it comes with the occupational hazard of loss. This woman loved the work she did with dementia patients and the connections she was able to form with them. However, she also struggled with the frequent loss of people she had bonded with.

Anthologies