Collaboration of Poet and Artist This exhibition features the collaboration of two colleagues begun in dialogue at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Section on Medicine and the Arts. The conversation continues as each responds to the work of the other in a poetic and visual "Responsorial Psalm."

Image 9 Self-Portrait (click to enlarge)

Lament for a Son

I thought I had discarded grief --
My father's grateful querying eye
Had compassed me alone, its brief
Trajectory without the cry

Of yearning for the cease of pain.
No, on the deathbed in my home
His opiated dreams' refrain
Unhooked me: I became a son.

My own child stood outside his room
Divining how one man should meet
Another in the arms of doom
No matter if the embrace were sweet.

He's growing into manlihood,
A boy no more, nor yet the thief,
Like lusty youth, of desuetude.
I thought I had discarded grief.

- Emanuel E. Garcia

"Lament for a Son" was published in The Pharos, Vol 68, Winter 2005, p.16.

Lament