In South Africa, I work with Professor Peter Zilla, the former Christiaan Barnard Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Cape Town. I wrote the following poem dedicated to a group of world-class cardiovascular surgeons and cardiologists who were visiting us a few years ago:

Regurgitation does not flow in a poem
Nor stenosis, aneurysm, dissection, transcatheter
Not even acronyms, TAVI, TEVAR

What is a bard to do
Maybe digress, with fluidity

The liquor of life
Corpuscular- laden claret
Fermented in bony hollows
Distilled in bodily chambers
Carefully nourished in lungs
Filtered, cleansed in delicate organs
Perfected by evolution
As in a München brewery
Or a wine farm on the Cape

But this elixir
Cannot nourish
The brain or the toe
Unless it is forced to go
To those distant thirsty clients

No dray-horse or wagon
No coopered oak barrels
Or deep-drawn steel vats
With shiny copper pipes

Edison, Faraday and Franklin
Did not figure this out
But Aristotle, Galen, Galvani and Harvey
Had the inkling
That a muscular core
Signaled by corporeal currents
Powered by cellular movement
Persuading the sanguineous fluid
To channel this way and that
Through elastic vessels
Picking up essential supplies
Discarding waste as it goes
To keep all fragile parts
Alive for three score years and ten

Now if this complexity was so simple