May 1, 2019
Flower fell
Off the tree
But now glows
More brilliantly
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“Every day, in each situation, you have a choice of thinking positively, or negatively. Here, even though it seemed sad that the flower had fallen off the tree, it looked more #beautiful on the ground in the midst of the rocks. 🌺😊 #mindset”
Jenelle Jindal writes poems the way a physician works toward a diagnosis: through close attention to what presents itself. Her work uses the compressed lyric to examine the craft of medicine, asking how we describe, teach, and measure what resists easy instrumentation in care. At its deepest, that attention becomes presence, a quality both poetry and medicine demand but cannot fully teach. She studied biological sciences and linguistics at Stanford before training in medicine and neurology at Yale and at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Poet Doctor