About the Author
Michael Creagan, the oldest of seven children, grew up in the city of New Haven, and then the town of Hamden, in Connecticut. He graduated in 1970 from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and has been working as a doctor ever since. For the past 28 years, he has worked as an emergency medicine specialist at San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland, California. For about 40 years, he has been writing poetry. This is his first book.
Excerpts from True Love Stories and other poems:
Road Kill
You may have thought things would come right again
If only you could sit quite still and wait.
— LarkinDriving to the hospital late lastnight,
I turned down a road that ran between dark fields.
Up ahead, in the middle of the road,
a small brown rabbit was sitting very still,
looking down at a rabbit who was dead,
a mangled corpse, run over by a car.
Lit up by my headlights, he took off toward the fields.
Slowing down, I drove by the dead rabbit,
then stopped the car, and watched in the rear-view mirror.
The rabbit came back and sat in the road again,
resuming the vigil for his dead friend, or kin.
Quiet, still, he sat and stared at him.Touched, unable to guess what you felt or thought,
I found it hard to watch you suffer this.
You have no words to understand what death is,
no words to ease your sadness, to console,
to mourn or pray, or tell your friend farewell.I hope you made it safely home last night
and woke this morning in the warm sunlight.
This morning, at my table under the trees,
because you have no words, I’ve written these.
I read this poem in a magazine several years ago. All I could remember was the rabbit mourning its friend. My lady remembered the hospital and the idea that the speaker decides to give voice to the poor, mute beast. Armed only with that, the librarian at Massasoit found the poem. Librarians are awesome.