Editor's Comments on 'Mea Culpa'

 , January 15, 2016

Long have caregivers and patients personified disease, marked it as intruder, interloper, and offender. Such a comparison was never more apt than for the cancer cell. Although begotten by chance event, its growth, recruitment of blood vessels, and ultimate migration throughout the body appears very nearly the work of a devious captain. In his poem “Mea Culpa”, Dr. Abhishek Kumar, Chief Oncology Hematology Fellow at New York Medical College/St. Joseph Regional Medical Center, animates with perfect voice the disease that Galen credited to “black bile.” Unapologetic, brash, urgent, monomaniacal, Kumar’s cancer cell – outfitted with “Colossal claws / And armored shell” - cites its lineage and immortality to the Hellenic Gods among men. For me, it has become the shouting cry of tumor.

Benji Perin

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