Good evening fellow poets. Paul the Scribbler here to ask you to think about the word Medicine.

What springs to mind? A spoonful of sugar? The discovery of penicillin or similar? The lack of medicine in the third world? Take your medicine like a….? Laughter is the best….The medicine wheel of the Native American cultures.

It is a word that has meaning on many levels. I recently completed a training in Music Medicine and this too was based upon a wheel. I’m going to focus a little on this use of the word as it fascinates me.

**”It is widely accepted that the Medicine Wheel is a symbol of life and specifically the Circle of Life. It should be stressed that this is not the same from Nation to Nation and there can be some representation that is very secret.  The point at which the lines cross in the middle is extensively accepted as Center.  Like color, which point and which sector represents what can be debated and broadly contested.

The part points as well as the four sectors have been attributed to representing the following:

The Four Directions:  East, South, West, North

The Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

The Four Stages of Life: Birth, Youth, Adult, Death

The Four Times of Day: Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, Midnight

The Four Elements of Life: Earth, Fire, Water, Wind

The Four Races of Man: Red, Yellow, Black, White

The Four Trials of Man: Success, Defeat, Peace, War

The Heavenly Beings: Sun, Moon, Earth, Stars”

Source** 

So the task at hand is to bring me some poetic medicine. The pages are blank and the directions possible are manifold. May your nibs flow effortlessly.

Here’s a poem by Allen Ginsberg entitled Hospital Window to get us off to a wonderful start.

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East 
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor-- 
Geodesic science at the waters edge--Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.
Y.
 Hospital's oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms.
 Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances're 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles.
 Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge's skeined dim in modern mists-- 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible-- 
U.
N.
 Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 
of a skull with a mild nerve ache.
 Dim dharma, I return 
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed--from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.
 
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day's release 
>from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle 
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile 
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile 
my empty mind.
 A seagull passes alone wings 
spread silent over roofs.

Happy Writing. As always write in your blog and link up here below. Don’t forget to take a stroll through the other poets work and drop some good medicine in their comments box.