Pandemic poetry @skylewriting: writing on my book of hugs

 

                                                                                           kate_sept2004/Getty Images

Never in recent memory have we noticed the loss of small things we take so for granted, on such a grand scale.

Suddenly, physical contact is first sliding away, like we each are set on ice floes that slowly glide apart, lapped by waves, pulling us apart.

Then it keeps yawning until it almost seems like chasms open up between us and others. We see them, but so far away… Could we even reach them, if we tried to grasp?

No contact (unless you are lucky to have it in your relationship); no touch, no touch, don´t touch. Almost as if plague doctors from the Black Death were walking around among us, whispering through their snouted masks: ”Stay away, stay away. Hic incip pestis. Here, here begins the plague.”

I wrote this poem when I was thinking about all the people I want to hug, once we can hug again.

We will be able to hug again.

And I am writing them down, those who I will hug, and how and where and when. When we will be able to hug, again.

My book of hugs

I don´t sleep anymore

I am up

all night

making a book

with all the hugs

I will give

after the pandemic.

Slowly I leave my bed

and gently put gold leaf in place

illuminating the happy faces of friends

acquaintances;

even Yara, the mail woman

Lucy, the barista

Ahmed, the falafel guy

tenderly I fill in

the glowing colours, paint

my passion on the page,

making longing shine like glorias on icons

I sit there, all through the night,

carefully making a book

of all you who I will hug

after the pandemic.

                        – Daniel Skyle

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting on Instagram

https://www.facebook.com/skylewriting

#poetry #love #poetrylovers #poetrycommunity #skylewriting #authorsofinstagram #COVID19

Pandemic poetry @skylewriting: love, and love, and love

 

                                                                                                by Afremov Studio

Slowly, over the year, I have tried to collect voices from the pandemic.

The voices of all parts of it: from nurses to the elderly, from the survivors to those who died. Voices from those tormented by lockdown, and from those who feel the pandemic slowly changing the very essence of how they used to see their life.

Perhaps some of this change might be for the good, perhaps it can help us discard old patterns that kept us locked. But in the middle of it, it can feel like a sculptor is taking a chisel to you, slowly chipping away, inwards, while you are unable to stop the bites taken out of your life. 2020 feels like it is a year that has given us defensive wounds.

And some of us are finally realising how much more love there is in the world than we thought.

This poem below is about an old couple separated in quarantine – but still holding hands.

Sing for me

Corona

an old couple

in quarantine

each in a different place

holding trembling hands

over the telephone

whispering

about how they danced

those nights when they were young

You were so beautiful

in your red

dress

You were so handsome

in your

brand new suit

Don´t hang up on me

my love, sing

like you used to sing for me

                           – Daniel Skyle

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting on Instagram 

https://www.facebook.com/skylewriting

#poetry #love #poetrylovers #poetrycommunity #skylewriting #authorsofinstagram #COVID19

Pandemic poetry @skylewriting: pandemic words for tourists visiting a strange country

 

The pandemic has made us all language students.

Each of us, slowly building a Covid Phrasebook, like travellers to a new land.

New words and new phrases are becoming part of the warp and weft of our daily life, taught to us whether we really want to learn them or not. Verbal threads weaving into our smallest chores, into our thoughts and dreams.

It is a new vocabulary to make ourselves understood in this foreign place of vanishing colour and of grey days. Some are words of intensely working science, once complicated that we now have learned to understand; some are in the special alphabet of grief.

Some are the words of tired acceptance, those where we fill our pockets with a new stone every day, feeling how we get heavier and heavier.

And sometimes we even find gold thread – a word that hints at joy, a word when slowly pronounced whispers about a future, a time when where we are all whole again, when the pandemic is a word forgotten like after a school exam from long ago.

Corona glossary

Covid-19

quarantine 

tiers this, tears that

fall and rend and rift and distance

socially

food banks

furloughs

redundancies 

virtual memorials

face masks

hiding the mask

some already wore before.

Refusing to die

I take a walk at night

lifting my head

into the rain

letting tears

patter

on my mask

                       – Daniel Skyle

 

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting on Instagram

https://www.facebook.com/skylewriting

#poetry #love #poetrylovers #poetrycommunity #skylewriting #authorsofinstagram #COVID19

A collection of poetry about the war in Syria: interviews with refugees

In 2015 I began writing a collection of poetry based on interviews I was doing with Syrian refugees.

I have been writing poetry and fiction my whole life, but this time it grew out of my volunteer work with refugees from the war zones in Syria. It grew out of my meeting their experiences, their horror from the war, the huge love that drove them, their often incredible bravery, and their journeys to get to safe ground again.

Refugees arriving at Lesbos after their flight across the sea. Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Over the next few years, it became an internal pressure in me. The stories I heard, the interviews I did for the poems, all started filling me up until I thought they would spill out by themselves. I had to write them down, had to try to make sense of them, had to help their stories get out.

(Picture from Aleppo, Syria, in 2016. You can watch the full video at CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/10/11/aerial-drone-video-aleppo-syria-ruins-zw-orig.cnn)

About twenty-five of the fifty or so test-readers of the book so far have been refugees; I wanted to make certain my poems gave justice to their stories.

Some parts of Syria are now, in 2020, beginning to rebuild and trying to resume a life even though it´s still under Assad. Other parts are still at war, with the long-time and added complication of Russian forces active both on the ground and in the air. 

Due to censorship from the state, if you live inside Syria, you can still not write there´s a war on. My poems in this collection are a way of helping to hold the torch for a little while, until they can lift it and write freely again. The poems are also an attempt to help make the voices of refugees heard, so that people understand why they actually flee. 

A bombed hospital in Idlib. Ahmed Khatib/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

This book is a very small thing at the outskirts of a war that has been going on for nine years. But I hope I can help make their voices heard louder. I promised those I interviewed I would get their stories out there. 

I hope I can also help people understand more of the feelings that lie behind the term “refugee”. It is an easy word to say, and most of us are so lucky that we can´t even begin to understand the pain that often hides behind it. Due to global warming and how it can ignite conflict and food scarcity, the UN says we will see an increased refugee flow over the coming years.

Our humanity is what binds us together; human rights are a beacon we have to keep lighting again and again to help it shine everywhere.

You can follow this book and my coming books here and @skylewriting on Instagram.

I will write more on the poems as we get closer to publication in 2020, and I´ll put some of them up on here and on Instagram so you can read. I will also add comments on the poems with stories of some of those I interviewed, and some texts on writing, inspiration, and the beauty and challenges we can find as we move on the edges of life. 

Welcome to my writing. 

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting

(You can also find my books on Amazon, here: Source Analysis for Elections)

#poetry #danielskyle #refugees #syria #climate change #writing #skylewriting #instagram #love #bookstagram #instabook #poetsofinstagram #poetrylovers #poetrycommunity #poetrygram #سوريا‎