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Year of Covid

By: 

Paul

Adams

I’m 81 and the chilling thing about Covid is the effect it has had on the NHS. Personal advice has stopped. I got a hearing aid through the post with unintelligible instructions as to how to use it. No one will see me and show me what to do, as I had been promised. I am not blaming them. It’s not their fault. It was inevitable, given the nature of the disease. I felt the need to express this in a poem.

I have never known a year
like the past one.
I have never known such
a depressed time.
And I’m 81.
Christmas and New Year cards
said to me they wished
for a better year ahead.
The last one was
awful.
Covid has made a deep impression
and has hit people harder
than I thought
it would.

Psychiatrists warn of the greatest
crisis in mental health
since the last
war.
Are people afraid of being
alone, separated
from friends?
A health service reduced to
telephone conversations?
A world of ticking boxes
taken to extreme?
Worst of all
no human
contact?

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