Poems for a Pandemic

During the first COVID lockdown I wrote a poem called You Clap For Me Now (you can read all about it here). And a lovely retired NHS nurse called Angela Marston rang me to ask if I minded putting it in a book she was making called Poems for a Pandemic?

But I figured we could do better than that.

I approached Harper Collins and together we published the book to raise money for NHS Charities Together. It reached the number one spot on Amazon’s bestseller lists for poems and anthologies, and was featured on the BBC, ITV, NBC, BBC Radio, Heart FM, and many more places.

Together we raised more than £9,000, all thanks to a brilliant retired nurse with a love of the written word.

You can buy a copy of the book here.

The story of how the book came to be is captured in the foreword I wrote for the book, which is republished below.

Foreword

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

On 23rd March 2020 the UK Government placed the entire country in lockdown in an attempt to reduce the impact of the Coronavirus. By the 7th 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 coronavirus. I did my best 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 wouldn’t 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 10 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