Day 304

The doctor, asked why he didn’t evacuate
when the evacuation orders came,
said to the interviewer, “Do you think
I studied medicine and prepared myself
for this work for fourteen years
so I could only save my own life
and abandon the patients 
I prepared myself to serve?”  He was killed
the next day.  All those years of study —
the diseases he’d learned
to recognize, the treatments
he’d developed, the ways he’d evolved
to speak to his patients, the triumphs,
the losses, the discussions with colleagues
over this or that way of proceeding
with this or that case — all of that,
gone.  His body under the rubble.
Gone his hands, that had performed
all those surgeries.  Gone his indignation.
His devotion, his doubt, his sleeplessness. His love.