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
What I Know
By Anne Taylor
That it’s hard not to take it personally when people avoid you like the plague.
That a word, or a smile, or saying hello with your eyes can make all the difference.
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Pas De Pandemic
By Molly Headley
tomber / pas de bourrée / glissade / jeté
fall down / stumble like a drunk / glide/ throw it away
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Three Poems
By María Castro Domínguez
I dreamt you were the only one
in your house,
a few months after that I saw
all the world
and all its people laughing,
a party was going on
in a fast food restaurant a birthday cake
was divided into portions,
there was more than enough
for everyone.
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Three Poems
By Linda Cosgriff
How do you count the cost
of the worldwide Covid-19 toll?
Begin digging the first hole.
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If 2020 is the Year we Will Hate Forever I can Honestly Say I saw it Coming
By Wallace Lane
I do not
need to hear the world is ending
to know that the thrill of something good
is no more.
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Three Poems
By Stephanie Powell
pausing at street corners
to see if my flesh becomes brick.
Shin bones straight like
streetlamps- face lit only by phone-screen light.
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Four Poems
By Bernard Horn
Consider your so-called life, that is,
if your hemming and hawing between
stolen life and pre-life, stolen life and pre-life
can be dignified by that term. Sure, there are
adjectives we living beings are driven
to apply to you: rapacious, single-minded,
flexible, dogged, but that’s just how we are,
driven to deny the nothing that is not there,
while you, like a snowman, do not see a thing.
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Three Poems
By Mark Cassidy
In sanctuary of an unlatched porch
I’ve laid my cycle down.
The door is thick-strong oak:
long hinges brace nail-studded beams,
an iron ring for handle.
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Three Poems
By R. G. Jodah
You can hear the rumpus rumbling all the way from aisle four
where some heavyweight contenders are arguing the score.
The champ has got a trolley-full, her challenger sod all.
They’re going at it toe-to-toe. The writing’s on the wall
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Three Poems
By Frank William Finney
Sitting in the bleachers of a raucous
rally, we listen as they pack
our old suitcase with wrinkled
shirts and holey socks
A week’s worth of laundry
that stinks up the room.
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Three Poems
By Paul Francis
The way it’s supposed to work is this:
she goes into the trenches, fights disease
and thanks to her and others folk get well.
This isn’t Disney. There are some they lose.
The odds are, mostly, reasonable.
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Afternoon Walk
By Tina Cathleen MacNaughton
I note, not without bitterness,
that this sadly says it all.
As if a rectangle of blue plastic
with strings and a squirt of
antiseptic was ever going
to be enough.
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Pandemic Panorama
By Amanda Jones
My pandemic panorama
Produces a plethora of play.
Inside my cage of drama
Comes a theatre each day.
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At the Twenty Four Hour Crematorium
By Linda Casper
In towns like Delhi, to deal with the pandemic at its height
Crematoria work all day and night
Wrapped in shrouds, ready to burn, maybe with flowers draped on top
Bodies of loved ones are brought here non-stop
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April 2020
By Susan M Evans
Attention must be paid on the early morning walk:
to the steady eye of the rising sun,
red, bloated, emerging from the sea.
To the pale green ghost of the super moon,
in perfect opposition; taking reluctant leave.
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Love Letter
By Paula Moore
This is a love letter to everyone who did not remodel the bathroom, learn a new language, or write a book during the pandemic. To everyone who wants to hold on to the lessons learned but is just trying to hold it together. To everyone who met the loneliness and loss sometimes with grace and sometimes by binge-watching Tiger King.
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Learning Curve
By Judith Mendoza-White
2020 rollercoasters
on twos and zeros insolent with power.
It frets in graphs of lives and deaths,
of fear
in curves that must be flattened,
in figments of plans delayed
to a future hollow with maybes,
betrayed by frozen hours
pulsating with religious or pagan zeal
with gods surprised
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What New Forms
By Andrea Holland
What is an event like this (and this) (and this) (and this)?
What new forms of drama (all of the drama is happening)
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A Walk in the Park
By Charlie Hill
And so, walking jumpily through the park where I had once played
drinking games with miscreants and unnamed Polish spirits – in joyous
violation of arcane mores and public health advice
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Two Covid Limericks
By Terry Marter
A vaccine, we all know’s the real trick
To prevent one and all getting sick.
Anti-vax minds are cold
to the facts that we’re told.
Either way all it takes is one Prick!
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Three Poems
By Guinevere Clark
talk under its unshakeable shade,
about years. Thousands of them –
graveyard statues in late sun.
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Three Poems
By Emma Purshouse
She walks them round the confines of the yard.
Lap…..after lap……after lap……after lap…..
after lap. Day after day. But it’s so hard
she has to admit, keeping it all intact
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Pentre Village
By Phil Wood
The driest May and fear of drought and virus,
that smear of honeydew, and sallow leaves.
Our wish list idles in a camping van.
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Three Poems
By Kathy Gee
That microscopic viral burst that started everything:
an exponential surge of matter, forming and reforming,
spreading outwards at the speed of travel plans.
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Three Poems
By Adrienne Stevenson
day by day the data mounts
raw figures accumulate
this many cases, that many deaths
even more undetected
wander through masked gatherings
adding their breath to the clouds
of vaporous viral particles
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Three Poems
By Steve Pottinger
more uncomfortable than ever
this wasn’t how she imagined
life would be and she curses
her luck, the virus, this new normal
where shops not clubs have bouncers on the door
everyone hitting the dance-floor
in the canned veg aisle to a soundtrack of
our colleagues are working hard
in difficult circumstances…
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Round the Ring
By Julie Cameron
Frost on the drive, glistening in the morning sunlight
Ding-a-ding-a, phone alert, rippling up a chord.
The postman on his round.
I spot him on my screen.
The post clatters through my letter box.
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Two Poems
By Evon Wheeler
I hadn’t know loneliness until a stranger said hello
for months now, I’m met with averted eyes,
people swiftly crossing the road, to avoid all human contact.
empty blue hands line bleak pavements,
as tendril arms grab forward, the weeds are taking over
a smile, disguised behind a masked face,
muffling their greeting
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Coronologue II: Vaccine Rising
By Rajan Sharma
Millions of people have now had it done, starting
With those who were high risk, including my mum;
At her booked appointment she rolled up her sleeve
Quick jab, then a rest, and then she could leave;
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Three Poems
By Ilse Pedler
We divided our days into coins
for the new Government approved slot machine
rationing them one by one;
a coin for our one form of exercise a day,
a coin for shopping for basic necessities,
a coin for let’s bake some bread!
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Three Poems
By Roy Bainton
The April sun’s out
Determined to pierce winter’s
Dogged hanging-on
Commanding me to write
Something cheerful.
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Subtidal Channels
By Graham Palmer
by the unsure foreshore of future Frindsbury
we collapsed slowly into the wine and blasted
chalk worshipping the hours we had lost
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New Year: Discharged
By Wes Lee
The neighbour’s dog barks into the wind
for the boy who is never there.
On the porch, tethered to its red kennel,
it eyes the world,
barks with its full life-force.
An eyelash drifts down from the skylight.
Each day, fresh things fall
to grace.
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Three Poems
By Alex Alec-Smith
Down the sun baked path,
past the defunct quarry
with its burnt out cars
to the railway line.
A labyrinth of bushes
that catch at my hair,
nettles knee high
stinging through my jeans
as I follow the faint trace
of deer.
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The Prince Rambles
By Juan Gomez
Father has been rummaging, fidgeting through the house
for lack of work, and I can’t help but wonder:
what brittle castles are our clockwork systems,
so easily distraught by slightest pause.
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Waiting to Exhale
By Mehreen Hamdany
In measured breaths
I count the days
In wary inhale
Of air and dust
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Three Poems
By Hannah Linden
The world is playing into boxes
we open like guilty secrets
in the clang of our private spaces.
Maybe we should pay a fear-fee
for the release we feel, so we bless the senders
with surprise emoticons.
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Three Poems
By Christopher
On the path outside the Highgate pearly gate
I stood and rattled chains, tried to enter, saw
That sign, again, ‘closed…’, I’ll have to wait
There’s no-one here, all furloughed, off to war
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Three Poems
By Doug Sandle
Their work is done, the pestilence and pandemic has finished,
the drumbeats of death stilled, and the apocalyptic detritus
of destruction cleared. They came determined,
though not swiftly charging on horses,
but meticulously and mechanically
on old tractors, mocking our new technologies.
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Haikus in the Time of Covid-19
By Pauline Hall
Thinking of their faces
beautifying my own
now ready to Zoom.
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Sonnet for Now
By Lena Mattheis
I often think about our space these days:
The world I touch has now become so small.
I think about how much we can erase
And lay skin-covered fingers on my wall…
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Pandemic Tanka
By Rose Menyon Heflin
Echoing laughter
The bus stop across the street
People are waiting
Giggling through the pain and fear
Discussing the new normal
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Three Poems
By Meiling Cheng
Once upon a time, there were dinosaurs.
They roamed the Earth as giants. They
ate everything, from vegetations to
dragonflies, from gazelles to tigers, to mineral deposits in
hard rocks, to their own babies. They combated
each other for sports. They wrestled with the
pre-Olympian Titans. They threatened to
dinosaurize the million futures of
terrestrial races.
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How Not to Get Corona
By Matt Travers and Manolis Kapazoglou
Matt Travers is a writer and translator based in Aarhus, Denmark, whose recent work can be found in 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, Asymptote and Tripwire Journal. He is currently working on the English translation of Søren Fauth’s ‘Moloch: The Story Of My Rage’.
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COVID 19, December 11th, 2020
By Gary King
A man in the ICU
puffed out
before his final breath:
I know I’m about to die
but no way in Hell it’s from Covid.
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My Impending Adventure, A Story for Another Day
By Naikaali Irene Ssentongo
Walking down a lonely path with no one to hold nor kiss goodbye. The oxygen mask gives me the calm assurance that all will be well soon.
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Covid Winter
By Clive Reed
How much like winter has this illness been?
The icy blast that caught us unaware
And kept us locked inside a fortnight long,
As danger lurked beneath its icy stare.
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Corona Virus My Sacred Teacher
By Matthew Gerald Mugerwa
If I were to take the road ‘less travelled’, I would choose you Corona Virus as my travel companion.
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You Burned Us Day and Night
By Ranjith Sivaraman
Are you a natural selection or invention?
If natural selection, I have nothing to say,
And if you are invented, let the ‘splendour of thousands of suns,’
Blaze upon the heads of your inventors.
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Three Poems
By Anna Cates
Spring 2020. No effervescent sparkles beside the fireplace. No wine glasses clinking. No strains from a violin. Only our “great adaptation,” this social distancing . . .
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Three Poems
By MJ Wetherman White
We’ve been cooped up here for months, just me and the dog,
the two of us sad, lonesome for the lost world we conjured
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Eve of Change
By Ed Davis
All falls down
now that it’s autumn:
leaves, acorns,
kings and kingdoms,
children of God.
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On Patience While Sheltering At Home
By Debra Williamson
Patience is a muscle now
a pause that flexes
with intention: I heard
it in the cardinal’s seven
wordless syllables, calling.
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Three Poems
By Rita Coleman
I can take it.
I’ve been around the sun a few times.
Go ahead, tell me all about the deaths,
tell me how they died without caress
in the slipstream between breath and silence
a video call of last words.
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Three Poems
By Louise Longson
The Welsh Lords are turning in their graves.
The shades of Llewelyn,
Cadwaladr and Glyn Dŵr haunt
the ghost town. All boundaries are
closed. Once it took twelve feet of
earth to keep us in, them out.
No-one comes now.
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Nineteen Lines on Covid-19
By David Lee Garrison
It sneaks up behind you
and spits on your neck,
it sleeps with you,
storms into your dreams.
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Four Poems
By Sulabh Kumar Shrestha
My capricious little genome
Walking through your ribosomes
Millions of crowned copies
Commandeering your body
A violent storm of cytokine
Blindly destroying everything…
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Headline: COVID Dead Buried in Potter’s Field, New York
By David Newkirk
the echoes reverberate
as they dream of dancing through the field
their bodies covered in flowers.
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Missing You in Lockdown
By Linda Hibbin
Empty bench,
No one is there.
I see you though,
Running fingers through your hair.
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Three Poems
By Annette Gagliardi
We ate the last of the peanut
butter yesterday. I used up
the Almond milk on half-cup
of Harvest Bakery granola, which
wasn’t as good as I’d hoped
it would be, so, there won’t
be hot cocoa tomorrow,
or pancakes for that matter:
no eggs, no sugar, no batter mix.
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Sweet and Sour
By Genevieve Soriano Aguinaldo
bank tellers become priests
holding confession in plastic
asking how much do we owe
or how much do we need
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COVID-19: New Rules!
By Gary Weston
Follow rules of social distance
It’s the path of most resistance
Stay at least six feet away
Don’t let others come your way
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The Streetwalker
By Erica Hutchinson
I walk alone in the middle
Avoiding close encounters of all kinds
Longing for a safety net of any kind
And a return to the narrow normalcy of sidewalks
…that may never be
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Cleaning in the Time of Covid
By Stella Ling
Cleaning the house with zeal of pornographic lust,
“Out, out damned spot!” was my credo against the dust.
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Three Poems
By Heidi Greco
These days of no-contact, no touching, no hugs
we’ve been banned from even squeezing the produce.
Instead, we must eyeball each piled-up display
arranged by masked workers in the quiet of night.
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It is the Time
By Albino Carrillo
It is the time
It is the time of
Gathering bags
Of dog food & weed
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Pandemic Easter
By Herbert Woodward Martin
The cathedral is empty; the tomb is bare from the body
That occupied it from that tragic Friday no one envisioned
Emptiness as its own pain, brain wondering about loss
Who is responsible for this disturbance
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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.