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Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020: Where the Invisible Goes
by Brian China
Leicester became the first city put into a local lockdown on 30 June 2020. I began the poem in July as volunteers went door-to-door delivering Covid home test kits. It's about a feeling of a return to an older city, Elizabethan, banished from the realm by decree. One contribution to the high infection rate was thought to be clothing sweatshops forcing their vulnerable workers to continue in cramped conditions with no protection against the virus.
Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020: Where the Invisible Goes
The city walls rebuilt themselves last night,
sealed us in tighter than a flood defence.
We are water in a poisoned well.
To Uppingham, Burton, Melton and London
at each city gatehouse our roads have gone,
someone rolled them up like dusty carpets.
We cannot see the beacons being lit
against an invisible armada
that sails in our blood so far from the coast.
A recorded voice from a passing car
tells us to Stay Indoors. Our freedom mulls
a limit it’s not met before.
A dark street leads to a dark factory.
The shadows pass fabric hand to hand,
assemble for thirty hours, get paid for ten.
Recording provided as part of Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020. Used by permission of the author.
A special thank you to our WordView 2020 poets.
Chair of the Judging Panel, Imtiaz Dharker, says: “The hundreds of entries we received blew in to the Archive like a breath of pure, unpolluted air from all over the world, revealing something of the time we are living in, some telling it straight, some slant. It was exciting to check in to the Poetry Archive’s Youtube channel every morning and come upon one unexpected voice after another."
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