This poem is part of the Medical Humanities vertical on Op-Med, which showcases creative writing by Doximity members. Do you have a poem, work of lyric prose, comic, or flash fiction piece related to medicine that you’d like to share with the community? Send it to us here.
Graduation Day
We celebrate new beginnings
And say our goodbyes to the people we will never be again
On the brink of everything that is to come
Hopeful, excited, exhausted in a way that
Only those who have yet to meet the future can be
No disillusionments will be sampled today
Today is for hors d'oeuvres suffused with hope
And the prosecco of promise and possibility
The rest of our lives can wait until
Tomorrow morning
Even then, this much will stay true:
All we can ever have and hold is today
An Interview with the Author
What was your inspiration for this poem? Were you influenced by any other creative works?
I love reading poetry. The beauty of so many poems has deeply inspired me. The poems of Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, and Billy Collins come to mind, but there are many, many other poets and poems whose brilliance has astounded me. In creating this poem, I have been deeply inspired by graduation speeches. Some of these were written and delivered by colleagues of mine at my institution, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and some by writers such as David Foster Wallace. I had the honor and privilege of delivering the graduation speech two years ago for the graduating psychiatry residency class of 2024 at Mount Sinai Hospital. I believe that the reflection and creative process for that — thinking deeply about what graduation means — laid the groundwork for this poem. I am, ultimately, heavily inspired by the spirit and enthusiasm of all the medical students, residents, and fellows I have had the joy and honor of having taught and supervised, and by what Graduation Day symbolizes in their stories.
How does this submission relate to your medical practice?
I work as a consultation liaison psychiatrist and medical educator in an academic center. My work involves teaching and supervising fellows, residents, and medical students on a daily basis. June, the final month of the academic year in medicine, is graduation season in my world: the three fellows we have worked with daily for a whole year graduate, as do many residents and medical students who have rotated with us. Graduation Day, which I bear witness to every year, is bittersweet: I see my students and mentees leave and I know I will miss them, but I am thrilled for them and excited to see what the next phase will bring. Graduation Day has always lived in my soul as a day that is, on the one hand, glorious, celebratory, triumphant, joyful, and full of optimism and promise, but also one that entails leaving a phase of life behind, entering a future that, while marked by freedom and possibility, is also unknown to all of us. This poem tries to capture the hope, the joy, the promise of Graduation Day, while also reflecting on its fleetingness.
Why did you choose this medium? What interests you about it?
I have had the impulse to write poetry since childhood, perhaps because I fell in love with the poems we were taught at school in both English and Hindi, the national language of India, where I grew up. I remember being gifted books of poetry by my mother and grandparents as a child. While I love writing short stories and essays as well, and certainly hope that there is a novel I will write some day, poetry is able to capture fleeting moments, slices and fragments of experience in a way that I don’t believe any other medium can. Poetry stuns and astounds me. It has taught me about parsimony and precision in language, and about how one can play with words. During transitions, and generally emotionally-charged moments in my life, I find myself expressing my feelings through poetry.
How long have you been writing creatively? What got you started?
I have been writing in bursts since I was 5 years old. My parents divorced when I was 5. We lived in India, and my mother and I moved from New Delhi to Mumbai to live with my maternal grandparents. My father moved to Connecticut. Then, my mother went to Saudi Arabia to work as a gynecologist to support us. One day after all these transitions, I remember getting home from a family gathering that my uncle and aunt had taken me to, and sitting down to write and illustrate stories. I am not sure what possessed me to do this at the time. From my current vantage point as an adult and a psychiatrist, I wonder if creative writing was a way of expressing something through stories, metaphors, and symbols, that I did not have any other way to express as a 5-year-old. Since then, I have written through a lot of big feelings. I now find myself processing so many experiences through poetry, essays and stories.
What does Graduation Day mean to you? Share in the comments!
Shruti Mutalik, MD, is a consultation liaison and transplant psychiatrist and medical educator working at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She completed her residency in psychiatry at Beth Israel Medical Center, her fellowship in consultation liaison psychiatry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and her geriatric psychiatry fellowship at Zucker Hillside Hospital. She subsequently served in the U.S. Army as a military psychiatrist. Her interests include working with living donors, and education, creative writing, and singing.
Illustration by Diana Connolly
