This week’s poem, Sharif Elmusa’s “The Medicine Man,” is dedicated to Dr. Husam Abu Safiyya, head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Elmusa shares with us that the doctor was seen in footage from last winter emerging from the rubble of the hospital and approaching Israeli tanks, and since then has been detained by Israeli forces. I love this poem’s startlingly clear imagery, and its symbol of the stethoscope — a tool for listening and understanding what is happening in trauma’s heart.

Elmusa is a scholar, poet and professor emeritus at the American University in Cairo. Apart from academic publications on the environment, he co-edited “Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry,” and authored the poetry collection “Flawed Landscape.” His poems and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Littoral Books’ “Enough!,” and he has presented his work at the Belfast Poetry Festival and Gulf of Maine Books.

The Medicine Man

December 24, 2024
For Dr. Hussam Abu Saifya

Look, another hospital razed.
The director is walking among the charred walls,
not toward the camera,
like someone seeking safety;
he is walking toward two army tanks, in wait—
a figure with a head of black hair
and encroaching gray.
Note his white coat,
now a clearing of the sacred
in the thicket of murder and debris.
His chest is bare.

His surgeon’s stethoscope is not missing,
it has become a part of his inner ear.
He hears the case histories of the mutilated cars,
the dead body parts under the rubble,
the shards of once useful things.
The eye of the camera is only an eye—
where is the stench of the everywhere trash?
The sunrays bear witness
to the shattered laws.

Look, the figure in the white coat
and bare chest
now arrives at the parked tank.
Bends his reluctant head,
enters through a low, surly door.
Into the disquiet of a creepy kind
of operations room, fate unknown.
Into human forms in camouflage
with fingers that push the button
and pull the trigger with pleasure.
Everything permissible. No buffer zone.
The medicine man is the world court.

– Sharif Elmusa

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is
produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Medicine Man,” copyright 2025 by Sharif Elmusa, appears by permission of the author.