Many in Health Care Have Made Sense of COVID Through Art or Poetry

By Hayley Jasper. All rights reserved.

Since March, AJN has been inundated with COVID-19–related manuscripts from around the world, ranging from prospective feature articles to submissions for this blog as well as our Reflections and Viewpoint columns. Not unexpectedly, we are also seeing many visual art and poetry submissions to our Art of Nursing column as we all try to make sense of this pandemic experience.

Art of Nursing selections.

In the July issue, we feature a drawing and two poems that reflect the times, as well as a reprint of a recent post from this blog.

The drawing, Behind the Front Lines, is by Hayley Jasper, an award-winning artist who is a junior in high school. Hayley’s piece was inspired by her mother, who is an ICU nurse in a COVID-19 unit.

The poem “Alone, surrounded” was written by Dublin geriatrician Shane O’Hanlon. Behavioral health nurse Marianne Broyles wrote the poem “Using Time Wisely During COVID-19.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

And I feel very small, like a field mouse.
It is all I can do to
Blend in and hope the great
Horned owl will pass me over…

We hope both poems will […]

2020-08-07T09:58:10-04:00August 7th, 2020|Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Two Poems by an ED Nurse

Mask

         -from Latin, masca (specter, nightmare)

My borrowed face,

incorporeal,                blue—

I give you        only

my eyes.

First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic

Deft swallows nest inside the thorny crown of a stone Christ.

I whisper Our Father . . .                   

twice

over the scrub sink.

 

-Editor’s note: These two spare poems were sent to us recently by Stacy Nigliazzo, an ED nurse and poet whose work has been featured in JAMA and the Bellevue Literary Review, as well as in AJN’s Art of Nursing column. We don’t usually publish poems on this blog, but make an exception here because they seemed to us urgent and yet timeless. Publishing them implies no affiliation of AJN with any particular religion. At the same time, it’s only natural that faiths and practices of every sort are likely to be a source of strength and meaning during this time for nurses around the world. 

2020-04-10T13:39:42-04:00April 10th, 2020|Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Permission to Grieve: A Poet Addresses the Unmapped Territory of Pregnancy Loss

You were so new, still more dream than person.

A poetry submission hits a personal chord.

photo by Susanne Nilsson/flickr

As the column coordinator for AJN’s Art of Nursing, which publishes poetry, flash fiction, and visual art related to health and health care, many poems cross my desk. I always appreciate the creativity and emotion in these poems, even when they aren’t quite a fit for our journal. And then there are the ones that not only fit, but that strike a personal chord and stay with me.

“Carrying,” by Katie Manning, PhD, MA, is one such poem. (Click on the PDF for the best version.) It immediately touched me because of the powerful way it described a sensitive topic: pregnancy loss. As a mother who lost a pregnancy in my second trimester, I found myself nodding with tears in my eyes at her elegant descriptions of grief and loss.

The poem received universal praise from our peer reviewers, and when I wrote to Manning to tell her we’d accepted it, I added a personal note about my own experience (something I had never done as an editor). We exchanged words of comfort and spoke about how the topic is not nearly discussed enough.

An […]

2020-03-16T12:16:01-04:00March 16th, 2020|patient experience, women's health|2 Comments
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What Do Haiku Have to Do with Nursing?

Nurse poets among us.

April is National Poetry Month, and all kinds of excellent poetry will be highlighted in various online and other venues, including, of course, in AJN’s Art of Nursing column, where the poem “Cat-a-tonic” by Shawna Swetech is featured this month (click on the pdf in the upper right corner of the landing page for the best version). I’m not a poet, though there are many nurse poets among us, and I’m not a fan of every poem I meet, but one form that is guaranteed to interest me every time is the haiku.

A short, simple poetic form.

Centuries ago, Japanese poets wrote the first haiku poems. A haiku has a very specific structure:  three lines only, with exactly five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Five-seven-five. (Though not every haiku today follows these rules strictly.) A haiku might rhyme, or not; it may or may not include punctuation or typical capitalization.

“Scrubs” not “uniforms” –
simpler than we used to wear.
Still, I miss my whites.

Traditionally, haiku have been written to celebrate nature. The best of these paint beautiful pictures in a few simple words. They are often very musical to the ear, […]

2019-04-02T07:57:53-04:00April 2nd, 2019|Nursing, writing|6 Comments
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AJN Collections of Note: From Women’s Health Issues to Assessment Tools for Older Adults

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

'Nuff Said by ElektraCute / Elektra Noelani Fisher, via Flickr. Elektra Noelani Fisher/ Flickr

It’s easy to miss, but there’s a tab at the top of the AJN home page that will take you to our collections page. There you can delve more deeply into a wide range of topics—and find many options for obtaining continuing education credits in the process.

For example, you’ll find a collection of recent continuing education (CE) feature articles devoted to women’s health issues, such as menopausal hormone therapy, cardiovascular disease prevention for women, and issues faced by young women who are BRCA positive.

The patient population in the U.S. continues to age. To gain confidence in meeting the needs of these patients, nurses can consult our practical collection of articles and videos devoted to the use of evidence-based geriatric assessment tools and best practices.

For the more creative side of nursing, we have a collection of 20 visual works and poems from our Art of Nursing column.

For those concerned with potential legal issues, it’s a good idea to have a look at the three CE articles from our Legal Clinic column on protecting your nursing license.

For would-be authors and those interested […]

2016-11-21T13:02:31-05:00May 18th, 2015|Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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