July 1, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Jan Steckel: Doctor Poet
Reviewing Images
Thirty-six hours on call,
and it's Beltane again.
Blood rises,
life boils,
power uncoils,
creation unfurls.
Over the x-ray image of the heart's vessels that I review,
a bull's head with curving horns superimposes itself,
the same shape as the uterus with cornua,
or the bare-breasted Cretan Lady holding snakes aloft in either hand.
The Lady wears graceful drapery of sheer cloth about her rounded hips,
her headdress a recumbent crescent moon.
Cymbal-clashing dancers wind
to the cool spring sanctuary in the dark earth.
A man runs like a stag from the hunt.
Downward flashes a silver-handled sickle,
opening wine-dark rivers of blood.
I am a doctor now,
not a sacrifice.
Next image, please.
The Pediatrician's Prayer for Perfection
See how she grabs my finger?
Your daughter is strong, what a grasp!
Look how she roots around for the nipple
when I stroke her cheek.
(Let this baby be as perfect inside as outside.
May her heart murmur be as innocent as she is.
Let her not stop breathing one morning for no reason and,
when her mother picks her up from an extra-long nap,
be already cold to the touch.)
Perfectly normal, that's perfectly normal!
Oh, she only has eyes for her mother, see,
she's looking at you!
(Now that this baby girl is delivered, deliver her from infection,
structural defects, neoplasm, metabolic deficiencies, and
from shaking by the boyfriend who is not her father,
from smothering by her mother who needs mothering herself.)
Your daughter is perfect, absolutely perfect!
(More than anything,
let me not have made a mistake.)
(from WomanPrayers, HarperSF, edited by Mary Ford-Grabowsky)
Jan Steckel is an Oakland writer and a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various periodicals and the anthologies Becoming Doctors, Touchwords, and WomanPrayers. Bilingual in Spanish/English, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic before taking care of Latino children as a pediatrician in the California public health system and later a large HMO. You can read more of her work at www.jansteckel.com.