The pulse keepers: a poem

Dr Abbas Tejani pens an ode to GPs 

Here’s to the ones who sit behind desks,
beneath fluorescent lights and the weight of the world.
The ones who know more than they show,
but keep their faces steady when your world cracks open.

You walk in with a list of questions
written in fear, inked with pain.
They’ve seen it all—coughs and whispers,
bones broken and hearts breaking.
They meet you in the rawness of your story,
between breaths and blood tests.

‘Take a seat,’ they say.
But it’s more than a chair—it’s an altar,
where hope kneels before exhaustion.
They don’t just check pulses;
they measure the rhythm of lives
in ten-minute slots,
in the tick of the clock,
in the silence between symptoms.

You think they’re healers,
but they’re jugglers—
time, pain, compassion, bureaucracy,
spinning plates and prescription pads,
holding the weight of systems that don’t hold them back.
And still, they show up.

They know the language of lab results,
but also the dialect of your sighs,
the stories hidden in stutters,
the truths buried under, ‘It’s nothing, really.’
They see you when you don’t want to be seen,
ask the questions you don’t want to answer.

Behind those tired eyes,
there’s a storm of knowledge,
a reservoir of resilience,
and a quiet ache for the things they cannot fix.
The ones who didn’t make it back.
The diagnoses they dread delivering.

But they keep going,
with pens poised over papers,
hearts cracked but still beating.
Not because it’s easy,
but because they believe
that to show up is to heal in itself.

So here’s to the GPs,
the guardians of our everyday aches,
the unsung poets of pulses and pain.
In their hands,
we’re more than patients;
we’re people.
And in their care,
hope finds a way to breathe.

Dr Abbas Tejani is a GP partner and Honorary Associate Professor of Primary Care based in Leicester. He has been writing poetry professionally for 22 years.