A few years ago a minor heart glitch I was born with spiraled out of control and needed fixing. I didn’t want to worry anyone so I stayed quiet until just before the procedure. But as the masked nurses pushed the gurney into the OR, I suddenly felt terrified. I don’t want to die, I said. Please don’t let me die.

Their eyes filled with surprise and they all immediately bent over me. Everything will be okay. We’ll take good, good care of you. And then I was under the lights and then I was floating away and then I was waking up to the surgeon, standing at the end of the bed with his arms crossed, grinning. Do you remember telling us to stop setting your heart on fire? 

That whole day came washing back over me when I read this poem below. The kindness of the nurses and doctors. The wondrousness of a world in which a heart can be precisely burned in multiple places and emerge okay. The openheartedness of an unknown person who, long before their own death, chose to save another’s life with their own body. The knowledge that we get just one heart, and whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s always on fire.

February 14, by Kim Addonizio

This is a valentine for the surgeons
ligating the portal veins and hepatic artery,
placing vascular clamps on the vena cava
as my brother receives a new liver.

And a valentine for each nurse;
though I don’t know how many there are
leaning over him in their gauze masks,
I’m sure I have enough—as many hearts

as it takes, as much embarrassing sentiment
as anyone needs. One heart
for the sutures, one for the instruments
I don’t know the names of,

and the monitors and lights,
and the gloves slippery with his blood
as the long hours pass,
as a T-tube is placed to drain the bile.

And one heart for the donor,
who never met my brother
but who understood the body as gift
and did not want to bury or burn that gift.

For that man, I can’t imagine how
one heart could suffice. But I offer it.
While my brother lies sedated,
opened from sternum to groin,

I think of a dead man, being remembered
by others in their sorrow, and I offer him
these words of praise and gratitude,
oh beloved whom we did not know.

​
Click here for more information on the wondrous poet Kim Addonizio. Today’s poem first appeared in What Is This Thing Called Love, published by W.W. Norton in 2004. 

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