Poetry is always valued in times of crisis
Below you’ll find the latest pandemic poems and some historical greats, as well as some more contemporary classics nominated by the Poetry and Covid Team.
‘In the beginning the sky weighed down on the earth in a thick, black fog which trapped the prostrating heat in a blanket of clouds; and throughout the time that it took four moons to wax and to wane, the south winds blew with their sweltering currents of toxic air.’
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Like Monks
By Ed Meek
We find ourselves
in this abyssopelagic zone,
eyes clouded by phosphenes.
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A Poem for Dark Times
Dark like honey… dark like coal
Smothered with ash in a dead fire-hole.
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Pandemic Blessings
By Marlene Woolgar
Stained shirt
toe poking through his sock
he hasn’t shaved for weeks
or cleaned his teeth
not that it matters
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Corona Virus
By Ella Sanderson
Plans cancelled .
New ones made.
The only thing left a love that can be saved.
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Waiting for this block to end
By Adele Duffield
My words are queueing,
like everyone else,
not yet ready for gluing
themselves together.
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Springtime in Whitstable
By Rebecca Lehmann
In the hopeful time after the
railway blackthorn blossomed,
as the hawthorn waited to flower,
the virus bloomed,
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Fleeting (2018)
By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Today the temple went to the post office.
Of course it wore its mask. There,
it met several other temples, also masked,
some of them in a hurry as temples sometimes are.
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Four Poems
By Nancy Cook
In time, Hsuifang speaks. She has family
living in Wuhan where a virus rampages
the city; but she does not talk of this.
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Feet in Isolation
By Amanda Steel
I remember when we went everywhere together
I never gave you much thought
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Click Undo
By Elaine Bowden
Before weeks were locked and stretched an age,
The world, pressed gently, tipped about its core.
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Crown of Thorns
By Phil Millette
Our character is in a cage.
Away from a quiet spring, a strange spring.
The daffodils have no admirers.
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Safe Distance
By Rona Fitzgerald
The voice in my head is busy, reassuring.
But its variable – as if not enough air
is getting through.
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Four Poems
By Lesley Quayle
The way we whisper the word; to say it aloud
confers a truth upon it, gives it a taste in our mouths,
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Goodbye Office
By Stuart Whomsley
Getting up too early to commute to be in a place
it turned out you did not have to be in after all.
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A World Insulted
By Sarah Salway
It’s a single lung –
no, start smaller –
a particle of oxygen
in a breath
that’s never been valued
before
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When the Only Medicine is a Popsicle Shot
By Pat Edwards
They’re injecting defrosted Popsicles at the surgery,
hoping for a cure before their eyes freeze, stare out
at patients who are, frankly, incredulous, bewildered.
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The #PlagueOPoems Project
By Hugh McMillan
On March 17th, a few days before the official lockdown began, I decided to start a daily video blog…
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Points of Departure
By Rodney Wood
Since the lockdown I’ve been busy in the garden
tidying away old branches, rotting leaves, plants, loose soil,
other winter debris & creating some art
(as recommended by the Getty Museum).
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Air on a Kite String
By Jo Eden
Hover-flying stirs the wild blue
air-brush breath of hollow bamboo.
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A Contactless World
By Guy Dolev
The silence is beautiful, But can be of death too
It feels so empty, though there’s nothing to do
You can only hear birds cheerping, what do they care?
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Three Poems
By Pen Kease
You still have it – time –
minutiae of minutes –
elongated days.
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Normal in a Covid World
By Lisa Reynolds
He tells me
it’s normal to feel anxious
everyone is these days.
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Three Poems
By Karol Nielson
Spring came as the virus spread and most days I left quarantine at my parents’ house in Connecticut to walk through the neighborhood…
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Soothing Interval
By Gary Beck
We think the plague is gone.
We put away our masks,
walk the streets facing others,
not worrying about distance.
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Because This is My Brave New Self
By Tricia Waller
On days that end in a ‘y’
I just lie ………..here in this bed,
Instead of choosing to face the day.
It is my own way of coping
And no I am not joking.
Because this is my brave new self.
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Three Poems
By Gerry Fabian
The dancers have stored their shoes
even though their feet tingle for action.
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Three Poems
By Pam Thompson
the days are interchangeable.
First thing, lighting
a rose and gardenia candle.
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Four Poems
By Belina Subraman
El Paso re-opened their gun shops.
People are stock piling
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Five Poems
By Caitlin Thomson
Out the window I see a man walking his dog.
In his hand there’s a pastry bag, a to-go
cup with a famous mermaid on the side,
I’m a witness to another lifetime.
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And In That Slow Time
By Catherine West-McGrath
We learned to live quite differently
We learned how to slow down our pace
We stopped to admire the view
The beauty surrounding our space
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Four Poems
By Kate Noakes
All day fine chains of rain silver the windows;
hard to see, but easy to feel in a few minutes outside.
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Four Poems
By Rachel Spence
On the scale of fundamental time everything we experience is incredibly slow.
Sky like calcifying ash.
Last night, you told me London was about to go into lockdown…
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Three Poems
By Jenny Robb
Trapped within brick and glass day after day,
allowed out to walk once a day,
each day, blue sky, bright sun.
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Silent Park
By Carol Fenwick
Searching for reasons why,
against a clear blue sky, it has come to this?
In sultry spring sunshine, by the River Cray,
it is time to reflect.
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Three Poems
By Clare Stewart
My one piece of exercise. Orbiting the houses, rotating a local circuit. Winding home to my old loom, the interior merry-go-round, I pirouette towards the spinning-wheel that pricks my bubble, sleep in til eleven, refuse to listen to news, the stresses that wind up. Am I wrong to be enjoying this today?
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Four Poems
By Audrey Arden-Jones
It’s the noise of the men digging and shouting
I miss – the sight of yellow jackets and red hats;
they’d been drumming the ground for weeks,
shaping the new walkway in our town centre
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Three Poems
By Kevin Qweaver Jackson
Today turns on itself
as yesterday did
the rain keeps vigil
with the slate clock’s tick-tock
and I play the ghost
slipped between.
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Corona Café Realness
By P. J. Reed
please keep a safe
distance
follow the footsteps
on the floor
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Three Poems
By Gareth Culshaw
We drop off the shopping with parachute hands.
Stand with neighbourly distance. Your energy
runs out of you as a child on waking up at Christmas.
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Three Poems
By Laura Grace Weldon
I think it’s Saturday, but it’s Tuesday.
Afternoon has dragged on long enough
to be evening now, though the clock insists
it’s not yet three. No Zen retreat, no generative
challenge, this isolation feels like being lost.
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And Just Like That, the Whole World Changed
By Sky Hawkins
Sky Hawkins aka The Word Bird is a dyslexic poet and has been ranting on stages, winning the odd slam in the north east and beyond for over a decade now
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The Floor is Lava
By Leanne Moden
so, I furl my knees to my chest,
adrift on a raft the same shape as my settee. Burn-
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Nineteen Ways of Looking at a Pandemic
By Dotty LeMieux
the sound a boulder makes
before beginning
its deadly downhill
roll
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One Hundred Sixty Days Later
By Nicole Griffin
my office like Pompeii
frozen in the moment
disaster struck
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Flattening the Curves
By Shirley McIntyre
I’m sick of the sight of my pre-Covid clothes,
They show off my wobbly fat tum.
I have shirts with no buttons, and jeans with zapped zips,
They’ll never squash over my bum.
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Three Poems
By David Spicer
Red fog came months ago and may never leave
An unwanted guest it remains our focus
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Grain of Salt
By Stephen Mead
Take it with, take it.
Over the shoulder,
right side; left?
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Golden Oak With Huge Acorns
By Clare Best
Lockdown in a quiet village on the edge of Tunstall Forest near the Suffolk coast was not, on the face of it, so distant from normal everyday life here…
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Essential Exercise
By Jean Atkin
In this sunnier, odder spring with louder
birdsong, sweeter lanes and tall
blue skies unstreaked by planes
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April Saturday (Virus Time)
By William Coniston
Through a gap between the edge of the world and the sun’s chin resting on a skylark you can hear a blackbird pirouetting
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The Singular Ramblings of the Solitary
By John Grey
It’s all I want / a path to reopening/all of it is confusing/revealed at last:
all that I want – dreaming or awake – a plan to ease lockdown –
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Re-reading La Peste in the time of COVID-19
By Phil Vernon
Fléau – I had to look it up – it’s ‘scourge’:
gunshots and shouts heard faintly in the night,
and then the sound of nothing, from the hour
we woke, till darkness muffled even silence.
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Four Poems
By John Brewer
The world we left is not where we’ll return
There is so much lost for which we yearn
And so many new things we have to learn
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Five Poems
By J. I. Kleinberg
These visual poems are from an ongoing series of collages (2200+). Each contiguous fragment of text (roughly the equivalent of a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax.
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The Last Day of Swifts
By Adrian Salmon
Each morning now we look out the window,
wonder if yesterday
will have been the last day of swifts.
It’s become late so fast
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Three Poems
By Moira Garland
We are so stupidly happy this minute
next crying into the washing up
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DISTANCING
By Christine Macfarlane
When seen through a microscope
Covid-19 is a live limpet-mine.
Small spikes radiate from it – like sputnik.
This word, when translated from the Russian,
means fellow traveller.
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R0 = 2
By Michael J. Leach
‘The basic reproduction number (R0) is the reproduction number when there is no immunity from past exposures or vaccination, nor any deliberate intervention in disease transmission…[The reproduction number] is defined as the mean number of infections generated during the infectious period of a single infective.’
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About Us
Poetry and Covid is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, aiming to share poems and spark discussion around poetry and pandemics.
Dive into some poems and start commenting to join the conversation. Plus, submit a poem to poetryandcovid@gmail.com and be featured here and on social media.
The opinions expressed in works published on this website are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of the PoetryandCovid editors. We will not knowingly publish anything in breach of libel laws or which promotes anti-social views.