Invitation to virtual poetry reading with Shawna Swetech Saturday, August 10

[Lawrence Robinson]

You are cordially invited to join us for a virtual reading featuring Shawna Swetech

Saturday, August 10 from 10:00 to 10:30 AM PDT

You will not need to pre-register; just click this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86550447307?pwd=dzYwMXI3Q085Tk12VncxTDJOekJlUT09

Shawna L. Swetech, RN—a hospital medical/surgical nurse, retired after 35 years, is a poet, visual artist and Integrative Wellness practitioner. Her poems and art range from the personal to the political, drawing inspiration from the deep wells of human nature and the natural world. Her  poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Permanente Journal, Rattle, The Healing Muse, Marin Poetry Anthology, California Quarterly, Ars Medica, Pulse, American Journal of Nursing, and Nursing2023, among other journals and anthologies. Shawna has recently completed a full-length collection of medical narrative poetry based primarily on her nursing career, entitled “Standing in Their Fire”. Co-host for the monthly poetry reading series, Rivertown Poets, Shawna believes poetry and art are important healing medicines for the ills of our modern world.



             In Their Fire


8 am rounds,
stethoscope in hand.
The endless rooms of patients,
broken-boned or cancer-filled,
their fear and pain a bleeding river   I can never staunch.
To be a nurse
is to be 
in their fire:
					    the diseased, incised, dying.
I didn’t know
what I was signing up for thirty-five years ago,
the shift after shift
familiar scent of sorrow, theirs and mine.
I didn’t know
how willingly
      I’d share the burden. 
      I didn’t know
       how willing
       I’d burn.

- Shawna Swetech



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