Selected poems
Fifty year reunion
harvested fruits, fresh, we men and women both,
the pick of the academic crop,
innocently green and impatient for ripening
in the august halls of medical school
challenging us, clarion clear,
from latinised hippocratic portals,
'hanc meam artem profitebor cum pietate et sanctitate',
I will practise this my art with purity and holiness.
now, we the remnants, largely spent,
professors, teachers, beloved practitioners,
scientists, world leaders, pioneers,
a menagerie of specialists,
some Australia's honoured citizens,
the sick, the grey, the bent, the pill dependent,
divorcees, the widowed, the saints, the sinners,
bound and equal, together, all as one,
gathered again, searching out new pastures,
denying mankind's stark mortality.
and hovering unseen, absent others, forever joined,
friends, lovers, team mates, husbands, wives,
competitors, those who are no more,
felled by our hippocratic-sworn adversary, disease,
or, in despair, by their own healing hands.
great losses all, memories best unspoken.
The gift
Suspended in sterile light, donated life lies hidden
in dark labyrinthine depths of blown false human breathing,
each breath a charade, a footstep t'wards eternity,
dispensed by humane reasoning at the flick of a fatal switch.
In this now soul-less frame, the harvester of mellowed lifeness,
mask-hid, gloved, and gowned in deluded godliness,
dares cheat death of nothingness, reclaiming life
in sanguine fields rent by pristine stainless steel.
From child-life in flight, the surgeon's frantic pursuit
defiles all that be-ing had made and daring death's dark scythe
reaps a trim renaissance, a lifeless kidney,
pallid-cold, cradled in his resurrecting hands.
This precious parting gift will live again, de facto, incognito,
a-brim with pulsing meaning in a coy and foreign bed,
renewed by hearted welcome in this wrung malaiséd being,
fresh-cleansed, renewed, by a stranger's gift supreme.
oh surgeon,
flaunting godliness,
custodian of gifts divined
from vast depths of God's good graces,
heed dear surrogate, sham divine,
new life is His great gift, not thine.
John Frawley AM is a retired university vascular and transplantation surgeon living in Sydney. With over 70 scientific articles and book chapters in the international surgical literature, he is also the author of four books, including A Surgical Life and Controversy Confusion and Catastrophe: Catholicism in the Wake of Vatican II. His poetry has been published in the Best Australian Poems series.