Running on Empty?

How poetry cheers me up even when everything is just rubbish.

      Here we are, almost into April and I am still not feeling well. It appears from recent blood tests that I have had pneumonia or something very similar in so far as it has required three rounds of industrial strength antibiotics and ten days of steroids before any improvement. I have had pneumonia before and it’s all horribly familiar. I would fiercely resent the fatigue it leaves if only I had the energy. I’m trying to be sensible and just walk a little bit every day and rest in the afternoons. I’m lie on the sofa and watch Scandi Noirs after doing a bit of something in the morning.I feel a bit like I think a phone battery might feel when it’s nearing the end: you charge it up but the juice runs out almost before you’ve unplugged.

      That said, it was the second meeting of our Poetry Society Stanza Group this week. Despite feeling under par, the opportunity to meet with other poets was emotionally energising. Different approaches to writing, different styles but an atmosphere of support, respect, and celebration. I have been experiencing a bit of a dry patch poetry-wise lately and there hasn’t been that much writing so it’s great to have the deadline of the group meeting day and to have the inspiration that comes from new perspectives. It’s not the same as being well enough to put on my running shoes and head up the hill but it’s a healing, affirming thing.

      I have had a couple of other boosts to my battery in the last few days. The first tremendous boost was being nominated for a single poem Forward Prize. I mean, blimey! Then, straight after receiving a rejection for a couple of poems I was hoping would make it into an upcoming anthology, I learned that my manuscript, A Long Way Down has been made a joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. I am thrilled and grateful beyond measure. The poems are about my father and about the impact of both his career and his PTSD on him and on me and my siblings. I am impatient for people to read them!

      I really value my poetry life. I feel that I have been lucky in my online friendships formed through poetry. In the last few months a couple of those beautiful online poets have died and their loss has saddened me even though we had never met in real life. The interaction with other poets in Zoom rooms, on social media platforms and here on Substack is important.

      What am I trying to say? Engage with me and other poets, say hi, like a poet, repost a poem now and then, share your stuff so I can enjoy it. The world is going to Hell in a handcart so we need to uphold one another until we manage to find the handbrake!

      So, a couple of poems about being poorly perhaps. The first is also to be found in the Poetry Archive and I wrote it after I had COVID a couple of years ago. You can hear me read it there if you want to.

I chart my recovery

Today I am a bit less cough

a bit more lungs

there is breathing   but

I would not call it easy

I am a right-sided migraine headache

    with elements of rage

it makes me hot as venom

it is exhausting

I sleep   hope to wake

with more tolerance of light

    more tolerance

More eyes    less weeping

    It is exhausting

When I wake I am

a bit less muscle ache

a bit more legs

      I walk without holding

onto the wall

I am less nausea   more

     say it quietly     hunger

Hunger

I have blood boiling

on the hob

     it never thickens

boiling     roiling    rage

and I thirst

Under The Weather

Remember when it rained so much

it felt as though the sky

had spent itself with weeping;

flung itself, exhausted,

in sodden heaps across the fields?

It felt as if the very possibility of morning

hung balanced between our outward

and our inward breaths.

The weather asked a question we could not

answer and the day became fog, the air

tasting like ash in our mouths.