a poem in honor of Paul Farmer, MD

Paul Farmer is a physician who has managed to keep the patients he takes care of foremost in his mind, even as he confronts all the difficulties of 3rd world health care in Haiti, and elsewhere. He has made perhaps the greatest difference of any physician I know, in confronting the insufficiencies and inequities of care, and saying in outrage, that it is not enough, and that we can do better. He has fundamentally changed the way care is given for Tuberculosis, AIDS/HIV, malaria, and other diseases which are consequences of dire poverty, all over the world. Please see more in the book "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder, about Dr. Farmer's life. And then go online to Partners in Health, and see what he is accomplishing now-- I hope you will become a supporter of this model of care-giving! This poem was accepted and published by the Meridian Anthology. It is also in the second book of my poems.


THE DEATH OF THE MANGO LADY
(for Paul Farmer MD)

All the ladies in the little overturned truck
Spilled like mangos onto the road,
Though they were also carrying the mangos to market.
The mangos, in rainbow sherbet colors,
Like sunrise and sunset in Haiti,
Spilled out all over the road,
Spilled and splattered open,
Their soft apricot and coral juicy flesh
Sweetening the dust,
A whole month’s wages lost.

“Grangou, grangou”; hungry children
Scrambled to retrieve the salvageable ones.
The mango ladies,
Holding their moaning mouths,
Watched the truck driver
Lay a piece of cardboard
Over the body of their friend,
With her legs and feet still uncovered.
Squatting by the roadside
Surrounded by mangos,
Like an altar offering--
Fruit of the world,
Suffering of the world,
Women on their way to market
Waylaid by death.

Mothers,
Watched by the hungry children,
Moaning,
Stopping
The incessant scramble;
Stopping to grieve,
Broken open
Like sunrise and sunset,
All over the dusty road.