Poetry and Practice

These moving sentiments were written by renowned author and childhood friend from Mullingar, Josephine Hart (Lady Saatchi, wife of Lord Maurice Saatchi)). I am taking the liberty of adopting them to introduce this Poetry and Practice section to our website. While the news of the pandemic is frightening, poetry and art can surely provide consolation and inspiration in this time of crisis. As Josephine points out, the sounds of words themselves can be healing not only in and of themselves, but in conjunction and juxtaposition with each other. But, she also suggests that poetry challenges us to take things to a deeper level. Robert Frost called poetry "a momentary stay against confusion” while Nobel-prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney also writes that, “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness." So, the very act of reading a poem can cultivate mindfulness and foster self-reflection by asking us to step back to consider the meaning of what has transpired in our relationships, how carefully we have listened, how we are relating to the children and families we work with, and to examine our professional and personal responses to these interactions for the purpose of determining further action. 

Poetry serves as a call to action. Our colleague, Australian poet and psychiatrist Jennifer Harrison writes - “poetry – if read properly – demands that we should change our lives” and Seamus Heaney reminds us, “writing poetry is about making a difference as well as making a thing.” So, as applied to our discipline, poetry helps us make sense of our own emotional responses to children and their families, sustain empathy, deepen our engagement in our work, explore concepts and discover solutions. As a multidisciplinary area of practice, our work with infants and families seems particularly suited to the practice of poetry because in infant mental health we seek to work in an explicitly strength-based, holistic and empathic therapeutic manner.

We invite you to share a poem or piece of art or music selection and describe why you choose it (in a paragraph or two - no more than 500 words), how it helped you or inspired you in your clinical work and how, in turn, it might help all of us.   Your submission can deal with pregnancy, birth, parenthood and its challenges, joy and pain, loss and hope and any theme relating to the privilege and challenge we ourselves encounter while working with children and their families at such a vulnerable time in their lives.  We plan to add a new contribution every few weeks.  We would like to include poems in different languages, so that if English is not your first language, we would like to be able to present your poem in your native language (with an English translation if possible). 

The Poems and Art and Music reflections chosen by you (most recent first)

In order to  remember and commemorate the life of  her sister, Sarah Hills (1971-2021) mother, wife and journalist, who died from Breast Cancer on Easter Monday last year, Emily Hills has chosen a poem that she loved, “Prayer Before Birth”, written by the Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) part of the Auden Group. She choose it, she writes, because the poem prays for guidance and protection from the chaos of the world today.   The poem is told by an unborn child who comes from a world of safety, inside the warmth of the womb. The poem inspired her to remember the importance of the first 1001 days and the need to nurture and support each baby and their family as they arrive in this unsettling and unpredictable world we live in. The poem reminds her that it is such an honour to meet a family for the very first time and that our words and actions matter.  But mostly she adds, that she choose it because she “misses her big sister”.

Canadian Psychiatrist, Normand Carrey submitted two poems, one by Jack Gilbert “Flying and Failing” and the other is his own composition, “Swimming the Consciousness of Long Lake”. In his introduction to his poem, he tells us that although he enjoys enjoys swimming he can’t help but panic a little when he starts thinking about how deep the Lake may be. He goes on to say that he tries to use his rational mind but the fear is always there, nudging him.  And while the analogy between the water as a “Lake of twisting gravity” and the fear of drowning as opposed to water as the life-sustaining enveloping amniotic membrane may be obvious, he had not connected the two meanings together until he took NBO and NBAS training and then dealing with babies emerging “fresh out of the womb” that suddenly the poem acquired that extra layer of meaning.

Psychologist, Steve Michelson, selected Robert Frost’s “The Road not Taken”, reasons that reach across his career. He first heard it as an adolescent, when it was recited at President Kennedy’s inauguration, “Its words and meaning have rung true even to today. To me, JFK was young, energetic and idealistic”. Later, when he was working with inner-city youth in the White Mountains and encountered a sudden and intense storm, he writes that at the moment that “their aggressive, non compliant behavior changes suddenly to pensive and regulated. I, curiously, wanted to know why and subsequently chose the path of clinical psychology”. As he looks back on his career, he writes, he choose The Road not Taken because today “we are facing new roads yet to be taken: to seek peace, unity, and health to our planet and to all”.

Lise McElaney, a clinician in the Center for Early Relationship Support at Jewish Family and Children’s Center of Greater Boston (JF&CS) and also Co-founder and President of Vida Health Communications, chose Rebecca Badge’s poem, Testimony, because she says, “It is a lifeline for me in COVID times. I want to believe it. But sometimes that means I have to assert belief”. She concludes her reflection by saying, “I feel called to renew my own faith in humanity – and in humility - when I read these lines”.

Eurnestine Brown is the first Director of Relational Equity and Belonging at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center and she is the Division of Developmental Medicines’ (DDM) Liaison, to the Office of Health Equity and inclusion (OHEI) at Boston Children’s Hospital. She chose Be the Change by American artist, Whitney Austin, because it is a “second by second reminder to me to be who I am – my authentic self. That I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, that I am enough – my shine and sparkle does not diminish yet adds to the shine of others. And lastly and more honoring, that my family and friends see me as a warrior, a hero in pursuit of changing the narrative on Black and Brown infants, children, families, and communities – we ALL deserve to thrive and soar, not just survive. This is a FACT, not an option”.

Jennifer Harrison, is neurodevelopmental child psychiatrist working at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne and has published eight poetry collections. Jennifer has already shared her own poetry with us, but on this occasion, she chooses the art form of cyanotype, which she explored during their extensive lockdowns in Melbourne, as a new way of communing with nature, particularly the foliage and flowers of her own garden. This immersion in cyanotype-making brought home to her “how nascent creativity thrives in adverse circumstances and lends to the spirit both expressivity and resilience in the face of world fragility. I love the fact that the flowers are disconnected from stems in this image, as if floating, waiting for what might happen next”.

Joanna Hawthorne, Senior Faculty at the Brazelton Institute and Founder and Director of the UK Brazelton Centre presents our first audio contribution, entitled, I love you just the way you are. It is a new song for her grandchildren, Julian and Felix, composed by Joanna and her daughter and son-in-law, with music composed and sung by Raimundo Santos and Joanna. “Singing” she writes in her reflection “is part of living to me. I could not live without it……Surprisingly to me, when my first grandchild Julian was born, I seemed to sing to him more often than I spoke to him!”

Cathy O’ Sullivan is the Director of the Centre of Midwifery Education at Cork University Maternity Hospital in Ireland and has been involved in midwifery education for almost 30 years. Whenever she is inspired she writes poetry. What led her to write “Seeing a Baby” was the sense of excitement she felt on completion of the NBO training in December 2020. The NBO awoke in her, she writes in her reflection, “an awareness of each baby’s individual personality”.

Sarah Roehrich is a speech-language pathologist who was worked at the Thom Anne Sullivan Early Intervention Center in Lowell, MA for 20 years. Her own poem, The Sandstone Cathedral, was inspired by her first visit to this canyon on a Navajo Indian reservation in Page, Arizona. She writes that “seeing this canyon and using the Newborn Behavioral Observation System (NBO) with families and babies, has filled me with a sense of awe, fine tuned my powers of observation, and challenged me to ask new questions about how nature is transformed over time by its environment”.

Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fellow of the UMASS Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health Program and a child advocate in Austin, Texas for 15 years, presented an untitled poem from 'One: Sons and Daughters' by Patti Smith. In her reflection she writes the song “inspires hope that society can value the significance of each baby's well-being”.

Kerim Munir is a child psychiatrist, who works at Boston Children’s Hospital and wrote this poem “The Magic Castle” as a tribute to “a special colleague and friend, Carolyn Bridgemohan”, who worked in the Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Division at the Boston Children’s Hospital and died on August 16th, 2019.

Jennifer Harrison is a child psychiatrist but is also one of Australia’s leading poets, so that we are honored to be able to present her own poem, “For the New Baby”. In her reflection, she writes that “I found great tenderness and wonder in meeting my grandson eventually after lockdown and I have delighted in his growing attachment to me. I find myself watching his development more closely than I have ever noticed before, either at work as a child psychiatrist or within family. I’ve fallen in love with him, perhaps as only a grandmother can. Pristine we are”.

"V'Ahavta" in Hebrew means "and you shall love..." and in choosing, “V’Ahavta”, a poem by Puerto Rican Jewish poet, Auroa Levis Morales, Alicia Lieberman writes that she finds “this poem a powerful expression of the message that the practice of infant mental health is inseparable from the quest for a better society”.

Aditi Subramaniam introduces a poem, “Paper Boats”, by Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, writing that “as a practitioner what resonates for me with this poem are identity and hope!”

To coincide with the third anniversary of Berry Brazelton’s passing, we feature Jayne Singer’s poem, Air and Water, a poem recalling her feelings on the day that Berry died but which “came to me some short weeks later”.

Australian architect, Niels Warren, presents two of his own poems, which describe how he found “direction and peace of mind” in a time of darkness in his life. They are entitled, “I want to be cuddled” and “My Scene”.

For the first time, we present not a poem but a series of sculptures, entitled “The Newborn” by Bulgarian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi and chosen by Drina Candilis-Huisman. The sculptures evoke in Drina a sense of wonder at the sacredness of the beginnings of life.

The words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “The Art of Helping Others to Understand”, were selected by NBO and NBAS Trainer Inger Pauline Landsem, because these words have inspired and guided her in her work with sick children and their families, throughout her career as a nurse in Norway. She points out that although Kirkegaard may have been referring to belief in God when he wrote this, it is a quotation that can guide and inspire health care workers.

Ian Balfour Kerr, medical doctor and poet, the author of this poem “Dear Children”, was a Mentor and friend of Susan Nicolson, when she was medical student in Glasgow. Susan, an NBO Master Trainer, writes, “Whenever I read this poem, I am transfixed by the way a mid-night stirring of the wind, of a man and of his still-sleeping children, made love expressible and gave fear a shape”.

The three poems chosen by Deborah Weatherston, Executive Director (retired), Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health, were written by Deborah herself and were inspired by her experience as an infant mental health home visitor - “the gift that came to me as I sat with families in their homes as an infant mental health home visitor and then afterward, in the office of my reflective supervisor”.

Kahil Gibran’s poem “On Children” is chosen by Lise Johnson, Associate Director of the Brazelton Institute and Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School. “This poem”, she writes, “has been a guidepost for me both as a parent and as a pediatrician” and has as its central theme the challenge parents face in accepting “the separateness of our babies” .

Constance H. Keefer, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School and faculty member Brazelton Institute and Brazelton Touchpoints, has chosen “When Night Fills with Premature Exits” by Enzo Silon Surin, which is written in the form of questions and has as its focus, racism.

Campbell Paul, Consultant Infant Psychiatrist at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne and President of WAIMH, selected “The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke” by the Australian “bush poet”, C.J. Dennis as his poem of choice.  It was written, he points out, in the middle of the First World War and just before the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 - like today, a world of turmoil and devastation.

Arietta Slade, Professor of Clinical Child Psychology, Yale Child Study Center and author, with Jeremy Holmes, Attachment in Therapeutic Practice, has chosen Sharon Olds’ “Bathing the New Born” as her poem. As a clinician, she sees fear in both mothers and their babies, but she feels that Olds’ poem beautifully captures a moment in time when the baby can feel safe and the mother herself can see her baby in a different light and come to discover that she is more than a “good enough mother”.

J. Kevin Nugent