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| National Wildlife Federation photo |
When I heard the learned surgeon,
When the pre-op, the nerve block, the anesthesia
were described to me,
When the incision and the sutures were traced
with a finger on my flesh,
When I sitting on the sterile paper heard the surgeon
in the examination room,
How soon I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding home into the hills,
I walked the fallow field by myself
In the mystical moist night air with fireflies floating,
and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer"adapted to circumstance
