Poems for a Pandemic

COPYRIGHT CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword The Poems Acknowledgements About the Author About the Publisher

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright in the poems © individual poets 2020 Copyright in this anthology © Angela Marston 2020 Cover design by Darren Smith The poets and editor assert their moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008433550 Version: 2020-06-11

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

The Poems

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

This is a book about superheroes. But just to be clear: I’m not one of them.

On 23 March 2020, the UK Government placed the entire country in lockdown in an attempt to reduce the impact of the coronavirus. By the 7 May over 30,000 people in Britain had died.

For two weeks in between my ex-wife and children had to self-isolate – she’s a nurse and was struck down by the virus. I did my hunter/gatherer impression and queued at the supermarket to load up with pasta and flour, diet cokes and pain pills. I pressed my hand against the window and my youngest son pressed his hand to the other side and smiled, his lip trembling, like some awful parody of prison. He was inside; but I felt like the one trapped.

I have never felt more alone.

But I was not alone. Clapping is a revolutionary act. I stood at my doorstep and cheered for our carers and felt the first fragile strands of community reaching out and making me feel connected to a world I thought was gone.

I wrote a poem about it called You Clap For Me Now, and we made a film with key workers reading it out line-by-line – each one isolated but connected. The film was selected by the United Nations as one of its global messages of solidarity and kindness. At the time of writing it has been viewed by more than 300 million people worldwide.

But most importantly it brought Angela Marston into my life.

I have never met Angela – meeting people is not the done thing in lockdown Britain – but I have spoken to her a number of times, and I can tell you that I know her. Which is something I am incredibly proud of.

Angela is a retired Palliative Care Nurse. She spent nearly 40 years in the NHS and Hospice services. She is the kind of person that, after discovering they cannot re-join the front line to care for people, finds other ways to help. Her heart is as big as a planet, and I am in awe of her.

Angela was struck down with Covid-19 symptoms and had to self-isolate in her bedroom, as her husband Phil is classed as extremely vulnerable to the virus. She locked herself away to protect her loved ones and lay alone; suffering. She says she was ‘scared I was going to die, scared I wasn’t going to see my beautiful grandchildren again, scared I wasn’t going to make it. In the early hours of my eighth day alone I lay awake, and a wave of words swept over me; and in trying to make sense of them I wrote my first poem in many years.’

At its heart poetry is about trying to express something too big for words. Fear. Loneliness. Love. Community. Death. The world threw all of them at us in one brutal instant and locked us away alone with a ream of paper and pens and said to us, here, work it out.

Angela’s health improved, and in her shoes many of us might say a silent prayer of thanks to whatever god we thought was listening and then carry on. Not Angela. She said ‘I was feeling guilty that I could not risk returning to nursing to support my old colleagues. I knew I had to do something meaningful to ease my guilt, so with no experience of publishing a book I decided to create an anthology of poems by and for key workers to raise money for NHS Charities Together.’

When a fire starts some people hide. Some people point fingers of blame. And others rush forward, eager to help put it out. This is what heroes do.

This is what Angela did. She gathered poems from nurses, doctors, teachers. From pharmacists and journalists; child protection officers and food bank volunteers. From people aged 9 to 92. From established poets and writers.

From heroes.

And by doing so she not only raised money for a valuable cause that supports NHS staff while they tackle the global pandemic. She not only shared messages of hope and understanding and grief and love with the world. She delivered a valuable collection of first-hand accounts from the front line. A glimpse of the global effort to rescue humanity from the teeth of an invisible enemy – direct from the people that don capes and masks in order to go save the world.

This is history in the making,’ she says, ‘and these poems record for all eternity the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people at an extraordinary time. I hope that in the future schools, colleges, and universities will use these poems to help students explore the stories behind the words.’

This is that anthology.

There’s no Thor in these pages. No washboard abs or laser beams. But if you look carefully between each word you will see a tiny space. That’s where the words that cannot be articulated live: words that demand a whole new dictionary to be able to accurately describe the magnitude of our gratitude and our love.

These are the spaces that my friend Angela made for us all to take a breath and say, simply: thank you. It is an incredible thing.

But then what else do you expect from a hero?

Darren Smith

May 2020

THE POEMS CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword The Poems Acknowledgements About the Author About the Publisher