July 14, 2021
my feet led me
to a field
the earth it asked
me to yield
closed my eyes
felt the sun
i smiled the day
has just begun
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“From a moment earlier today☀️🌾☺️”
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