What Happens Here Matters
Mville Poets at the UN
Four of Manhattanville's finest read original poetry at the United Nations as part of the "U.N. Visions and Millennium Development Goals Speak through the Arts" program. The program's aim was to foster better understanding and connections between people of different cultures and beliefs.
The poets read to a standing-room only crowd. The poems were about family, humanity, AIDS, homelessness, the healing power of art and world peace
One of the poets was student Terry Dugan. Terry came to the Masters of Writing program at Manhattanville seeking a way to creatively express her experiences working as a researcher in the Pediatric Aids Unit at Bellevue Hospital. In a course she took in Spring 2005, she found her voice in a genre she had never before explored -- poetry.
Terry began work on her poem "Tosca Kisses the AIDS Ward" in Linda Simone's poetry class. It was this poem that won first place for poetry in the "Unfinished Works: Art for AIDS" contest, sponsored by the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County, Calif., and was published in the anthology, Unfinished Works (2005). This was also the poem that Terry read at the United Nations. (Teacher Linda Simone was also represented by her poetry.)
Since then, Terry has enjoyed other successes: her poem "Body Fluids" received honorable mention in the 34th Annual Greenburgh Poetry Contest. Her poem Re: Search recently won third place among emerging poets in the Being at Work Poetry Challenge, sponsored by the Canadian Living Work Foundation. An essay, begun in her Creative Nonfiction course on the topic of unethical clinical trials in Africa as portrayed in the movie The Constant Gardner, will be published in the anthology, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Literary and Artistic Views of AIDS. Several of her non-AIDS poems were published in literary journals. Presently, Terry is hard at work on a poetry chapbook about the Pediatric AIDS Unit and hopes to obtain an artist residency to complete the project.
Tosca Kisses the AIDS Ward
I work on a closed ward with an open heart.
Elsewhere, quiescence reigns, we hear
Commotions, cheers, cachinnations.
To a shush, we respond with a shout.
Every day a party, guests trailing flowers, balloons, bears
festooned with ribbons and fairy dust,
The occasional clandestine cigarette butt.
Exuberance and despair jockey for space
Loopy benevolence sags into sadness on my face.
Whose birthday today? I bellow.
Whose giant teddy with a tutu in yellow?
In sotto voce, I say: Are the DNR arrangements in place?
The one rule to which we all defer
Never, ever, cry in front of a patient.
One day, tuning out the tintamarre
Of hums and whirs and beep beep beeps,
From monitors and iv drips,
The jangle of trays being flipped
The clatter of cutlery accounted for,
I hear Floria Tosca beseech
The pompous sadist Scarpia,
For the life of her lover.
A sonance like no other diva
Reverberates throughout the ward,
Maria Callas rocks the floor.
Two men in the hospital room
Cling to each other
Transported by Tosca's darkest hour.
Vissi d' arte, Vissi d'amore,
I lived for art, I lived for love
I ran, ran, ran
To the staff bathroom,
Tears dripping from my eyes
Mascara smearing my cheeks
Ghastly in fluorescent.
The head nurse knocks and robs
My sobbing solitude.
Security will soon be here
If you don't get out of there.
When I walk into the nurses' station,
She doesn't look up.