Winnipeg-born Ron Charach is the author of eight books of poetry, among them Dungenessque, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2003. His work is widely published in national and international journals and anthologies of writing by doctors about their craft. He was contributing editor of The Naked Physician, the sole anthology of poetry by Canadian medical practitioners. A practicing psychiatrist now residing in Toronto, Charach combines a physician's candid eye for the foibles of the body with a psychiatrist's compassion for the suffering of the mind. He creates poems around the memorable image, the anecdote that, on the surface, says little, yet opens to reveal a great deal about the human condition. Ron's humanistic convictions regularly find voice in the letters pages of Canadian and American newspapers. Essays that define and elaborate on his liberal humanist views are found in his 2009 collection, Cowboys and Bleeding Hearts, from Wolsak & Wynn.

Ludochka

Not for you the pleated skirts, you
who dazzled us in the coat closet
at the back of the class, butt slinking out
of the elastic-waisted jeans
you called “suicides”.
Not for you the comfort of only being imagined,
as you slowly peeled yourself before
the rapt attention of our blessed eyes.

Just minutes ago our minds were a haze
of the strangest form of boredom, and awash
with those black-and-white films of
naked bodies in heaps at Birkenau
that Mrs Lesnitsky forced into our gaze.

Decades later, you and I would meet again.
Under pancake make-up
you played the vamp so well
no one would have pegged youas offspring of a single mother with broken English
who flashed your tomboy body for the boys
in a dark room of damp winter coats,
dripping scarves and limp mittens.

It took you a while to remember me.
But once, when you slowed the spinning
of your pelvis, you cast me a longing look
not as if you wanted me to want you more
than anyone else in that little room did,
but as if, in a way I only understood years later,
I might become an ally in your counter-
offensive to take back the flesh.