A Nurse Offers An Elegy For Her Patient
For the past five years, Martha Kreiner, a registered nurse and a poet, has tended to the medical needs of people living on Seattle's streets through the Healthcare for the Homeless network. The death of a patient lead Kreiner to write an elegy for him, in which she re-imagines his final moments:
I wish him much moss furring
the edge of the sidewalk his head landed on
for the last time, last week. I wish him a mattress
of newly chipped bark to soften the slab
of dirt beneath the shrubs he stumbled in. I wish
all the landmarks he needs, he has:
(Excerpted from "He Wanted to Die Anywhere But the Street.")
Kreiner describes the poem to KUOW's Elizabeth Austen as a chance for "a do-over. It's a really giant do-over, and that's often what I'm up to, because I just can't stand how it actually is, or how it actually was."
She explains what writing poems offer in the face of loss and powerlessness: "The only response I can have that's adequate is an imaginative one. Poetry is helping me in a way that nothing else can. I think art and poetry has more room in it than I personally do. It's a wider container."
Kreiner worked on the poem during her fellowship with the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in Floating Bridge Review, ILK Journal, and Hubbub. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Michigan State University.
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Elizabeth Austen
Producer
Former Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen has been interviewing poets and producing poetry segments for KUOW since 2001. She began as an intern while in graduate school for an MFA in creative writing (poetry) at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Once she discovered the joy of blending her early background as an actor and director (Book–It Repertory Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Festival) with her passion for poetry as a spoken art form, she was hooked. She's been producing poetry for radio audiences ever since. Her collection, "Every Dress a Decision" (Blue Begonia Press, 2011), was a finalist for the 2012 Washington State Book Award in poetry. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, "The Girl Who Goes Alone" (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and "Where Currents Meet," winner of the Toadlily Press Chapbook Award and part of the quartet "Sightline," published in 2010. Elizabeth's poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac and online at Verse Daily, the Bellingham Review and DMQ Review. You'll find Elizabeth's poems in anthologies including "What to Read in the Rain" and "Poets Against the War" and in literary journals. She's performed at venues including Poets House in New York City, The Loft in Minneapolis, the Austin ArtSpark Festival, and locally at the Richard Hugo House Literary Series, Bumbershoot, and the Seattle and Skagit River Poetry Festivals. An audio CD, "skin prayers," featuring 26 original poems recorded with a live audience in the KUOW studios, is available on her website, www.elizabethausten.org. Elizabeth was the 2007 Roadshow poet, bringing poetry to underserved rural communities in Washington state under the auspices of the Washington State Arts Commission, Humanities Washington, and the Washington Poets Association. She is committed to fostering a broader understanding and appreciation of the literary arts in general and poetry in particular. She teaches frequently at Richard Hugo House, a literary arts center in Seattle, and she has been a visiting artist for western Washington school districts and colleges.
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