This poem was written by Dr. Maria de Sousa, a professor at University of Porto and Adjunct Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine.

She wrote this poem to all her friends days before dying from the COVID virus. I think it is an amazing piece of work which needs to be read.

Dr. Sousa was co-corresponding author with Dr. David C. Lyden, Professor of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, on a recent publication on brain metastasis (Goncalo Rodrigues, et al, Nature Cell Biology Nov 2019), and also a close friend of Dr. Rui Costa, Director of the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University.

Dr. Lyden, who studies children’s cancer, expressed, “this poem is at the heart of the crisis. Gifted people, such as Maria, in our own Cornell community, must be remembered for all that they did for Cornell and the world at large.”

What is the place of the arts in medicine? You can’t close a wound with words, or prescribe a poem in place of antibiotics. And yet for me, a pediatric emergency physician in New York City, the two crafts have always been intimately related. The arts describe what it’s like to be alive. They help us connect with and understand our patients, ourselves, and the world in which we practice. So it’s natural to turn to the arts as a method of healing during the Covid-19 pandemic.