COVID 19 ~ Yasmin age 13
Covid 19,
Oh how mean,
We’re stuck inside watching TV.
What to do when you’re feeling low?
Events all cancelled nowhere to go.
2-meter distance from everyone,
Coronavirus is not that fun.
Disinfecting everything,
Packages, surfaces, all look bling.
How to make your spirits rise?
Try doing daily exercise!
Call or FaceTime with your friends,
Digital contact has no end!
Snuggle up, with a book,
Get creative, bake and cook!
Embrace the artist that’s inside,
Canvases painted, tops tie-dyed!
Cardboard modelling, doodle and sketch,
Take your dog for a walk, grab a stick and play…Fetch!
Sit on a sofa, watch a movie,
What’s your favourite DVD?
Start to write a diary entry,
Remember, you’re living history!
So if you’re feeling really glum,
Remember there’s lots to be done!
And really try not to worry,
If you stay at home, this virus will be gone in a hurry!
*
‘It’s light…’ ~ anon
It’s light, I can feel it through my closed eyelids.
Maybe it is all a dream. No, I am awake, the nightmare is real.
I start
the day’s routine: walk, listen to the sounds. The birds calling to
one
another, the wind in the trees and the silence.
I study the emerging green leaves, fresh and pale, speaking of
life returning,
I start to feel better.
Short lived. Back home I listen to the government’s daily update.
The statistics of
deaths are grim, the grief overwhelming and the government
spokespeople
are agitating. I shout at the radio. Sadness and rage.
Do some qi gong exercises to calm down. I return to my routine.
Time to learn another
poem, one a week, for the duration of lockdown. “Poetry is the
quiet music of being human.”*
Restored.
*Carol Ann Duffy
*
Hilery Williams
Week 6: ‘Enormous anxiety’ reported in care homes as fears over PPE shortages increase. Monday 27 April
I’ve been having vivid flashbacks to woodland burials on two shining, cold days last spring – five weeks apart, soon after my parents’ seventieth wedding anniversary.
One day I’ll spend time again in that beautiful setting.
Almost every day for the past six months of their lives I saw mum and dad; three to four times weekly in the three years before. I was not there to hold their hands at the moment of death. Some people describe the importance they place on being there at the very end. I trusted completely that the care workers and nurses cherished them as lovingly as any family member. Compassionate carers, then as now.
My dad’s final words to me were: I’m so thankful.
I am so thankful that they are not here to feel the fear and potentially painful end so many are experiencing now. Their lives were well-lived, their deaths calm and peaceful. What more could I ask?
*
WHAT IT IS LIKE IN SPRING ~ Daphne age 9
Spring is here. New growth is appearing,
birds are always singing.
The wind is dying down,
flowers are starting to bloom.
Wild flowers pushing up out of the soil. Desperately
trying to grow.
In every country little creatures are being born.
Rivers are rushing frantically.
The sun is not afraid at all,
bringing love and playfulness.
Spring showers take us by surprise. Sprinkling a flush of
happiness and
coolness around the air.
IT IS SPRING
*
FRUSTRATION ~ Pat Bryden
‘Challenge 2.6? Just donate online!
Click here: it’s so easy!’
‘No paper, please.
Use online…’
… which is fine
BUT
– the password doesn’t work this time
and it’s even in my diary!
– the link for paying the other
isn’t live, so can’t take that line!
WHY is the technology so complicated?
Why does the password never work
the second go?
Why does everything have to be online?
– No, today I am NOT fine!
But for some, it’s much more serious
not finding the site for tests;
completely blocked
the tests used up
– a matter of life or death.
*
‘Outside my window…’ ~ Kirsten
Outside my window the world has changed
Once there were cars zooming in lane after lane
And mobs of tourists posing for a perfect picture in a frame
Now the roads are empty as canvas
Where tourists have stepped is now a desolate landscape
But inside my window life is almost the same
I have everything I had before
Except it’s all a little bit changed
*
Twenty years on – 28th April, 2020 ~ Jane Wood
The sunshine drenches me as I breakfast, memories flooding in of my first ever morning in an east-west home of my own exactly 20 years ago, delighting in the brightness of Edinburgh’s late spring. The heat was so extreme the day before that the ‘men with a van’ had baptised my shower before returning empty to London, leaving me in clean rooms of boxes. This was the steaming sand-bagged calm after the incessant rain of April 2000’s final week, changing the life-course of those who were frail before the river gushed into their vestibules and cellars, changing the feel of some of our streets… relief after the rescues, yet sadness in equal measure.
If only our tall wall protected all of us from today’s perils.
Our Colonies community sprinkled with precious gems of colourful, characterful friends and neighbours is again changing forever.
*
The Handmaid of the Lord ~ Alastair Hulpert
For some time I had been missing Greta Thunberg on the news, and then there she was again on Earth Day last week: the handmaid of the Lord. She was engaging in digital conversation with Johan Rockström, a Swedish authority on global sustainability. Their message was that both the coronavirus pandemic and climate change are crises with the same root causes and must be tackled together in this crucial year when emissions must start to go down or it will be too late.
With Covid 19 the world has changed; there is a new wind blowing in the air. Recovery will require a new direction for the planet. Which means that the question ‘What am I to do?’ is paramount for each of us.
When Rockström put this question to Greta, she replied: