Poetry in Medicine

This month, I offer another lovely poem, the fifth in a series, by a patient, not a physician. Carol Flake Chapman of Austin, Texas, is the celebrated author of several nonfiction books and is a former writer and editor for several leading newspapers and magazines. In 2015, she published “Written in Water,” a memoir which began as a way of healing from grief but took on a larger context to help others on their healing journeys. Ms. Chapman has recently produced two volumes of poetry: “Maybe We Will All Become Butterflies: Poems from the Pandemic” (2020) and “Wild Surprises: Stories and Poems about Encounters That Shifted My World” (2021). All three books are available on Amazon. In April of this year, Ms. Chapman was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, a distinguished honor society celebrating outstanding literary achievement. The daughter of a physician, a heart specialist who is now 98 years old, Ms. Chapman sees her mission as a poet as “healing the world with words.” The poem below compares the metamorphosis of a butterfly to an envisioned post-pandemic therapeutic awakening of society. The butterfly as symbol of the soul and rebirth is universal and ancient. In The History of Animals (c 350 BC) Greek philosopher and natural scientist Aristotle (384-322 BC), who originated the theory that an organism develops gradually from undifferentiated material (epigenesis), made the first recorded instance of the word “psyche” or “soul” in reference to a butterfly. Aristotle describes in detail the changing shape of a plump caterpillar to chrysalis to “winged creature.” Metaphorically, the cocoon is a tomb, and the butterfly emerges as the soul flutters free from the corpse after death. Modern biological science has confirmed that within the caterpillar are disc-shaped “imaginal cells,” undifferentiated cells, akin to human stem cells, that will eventually become a particular feature of butterfly anatomy. In the process of holometabolism, the imaginal cells within a chrysalis, operating as a single-cell organism, communicate with each other and connect to form a multiple-celled organism, a butterfly. The caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA: It is as if the caterpillar could always imagine flying. In the poem, the pandemic shrouded us in “cocoons spaced six feet apart,” and like the ravenous caterpillar, we were “fat and full of ourselves.” The poet envisions that we, too, possess “imaginal cells holding the deep secret of transformation.” In the poet’s vision, our “separate isolated cells begin to talk / To each other” and “come together in a new way,” emerging with a “desire to fly and seek the sweetest nectar.” Only after we have lost “everything we had ever been or wanted” are we able in a moment of rebirth to shed the baseness of our former selves and “grace the earth with our beauty,” a potential that was ours all along. Any physician (or patient-poet) is invited to submit poems for publication in this column either by email or regular mail to the Journal.