Poetry and Medicine 

28 Hours in the ICU

Kaveh Danesh

JAMA Published Online: March 11, 2026

doi: 10.1001/jama.2026.0660

I watch the sunrise

I watch the sunset

I watch the body

fall apart

while we tilt the horizon

away from light

knowing the sun

setting in the West

is

rising in the East.

I watch the sunrise

I watch the sunrise

I watch your pupils

suspended

midday

between two horizons.

[JAMA编者按]：ICU中的诗歌

Poetry in the ICU

Rafael Campo

JAMA Published Online: March 11, 2026

doi: 10.1001/jama.2026.0657

Perhaps the unlikeliest medical space in which we might imagine encountering such a similarity, the intensive care unit (ICU) shares much of the precision, delicate balancing, and life-or-death urgency of the best poetry. So it is with “28 Hours in the ICU,” where every word choice is as deliberately and painstakingly deployed as any critical care treatment plan, each tenuous image freighted with the possibility of transcendence.¹ The skeletal lines themselves suggest a cachectic patient clinging to life; the quiet, wan repetitions become an ebbing life force that is sustained by the hushed machinations of the untiring system. In contrast, the very human speaker of the poem, whose keen observations art makes possible, identifies his fatigue with the imperiled patient’s: watching the movements of sun and sky is as magnificently ponderous as “I watch the body.” The long hours of ICU shifts are similarly represented, where the movement of the earth on its own axis seems to stretch beyond 24 hours, as the title suggests. Poetry here is also able to capture the speaker’s awe at cutting-edge medicine’s power by implicit comparison with the workings of celestial bodies, evinced in the lines “…we tilt the horizon/away from light.” As the poem progresses, the speaker shows us how these worlds merge, when what he watches shifts from the sunrise and sunset to the minute dark planets (or perhaps black holes?) of the patient’s pupils. Through such startlingly poised poetic juxtaposition, we too feel the staggering gravity of caring for patients in extremis.