Today’s poem has been chosen and introduced by Teacher of English, Mr Macdonald-Brown.

A brief editorial in Saturday’s Guardian claimed: ‘Poetry has the power to express the grief and dislocation of our times.’ In evidence, the writer cited three new poems by Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage and Brian Bilston. Each one does indeed brilliantly convey some of what many, if not all, of us are feeling right now.

Kathleen Jamie published her (untitled) poem on Twitter. She called it ‘a re-balancing poem’ after ‘a weepy morning missing folks and thinking This Will Never End.’ It’s a personal account of a solitary walk in the landscape around her home in Scotland, and it starts wearily (read it left to right – let the white spaces do their work):

‘Trudging again to Lone Tree Look-out
high on the grasslands of Sparrow Craig Hill…’

On reaching the lone tree (‘crooked elder of the pasture’), she steps into its shadow, ‘outstretched on shallow snow’, and has…well, not quite an epiphany perhaps, but something like it:

‘Our two forms merge my lungs breathe within you
may a mistle thrush sing high in my branchy mind.’

The reviving power of the daily walk! If you have a minute, the whole poem is here.

Meanwhile, on Radio 4’s Today programme, the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, read out the words of a song he’s recently written for the Huddersfield Choral Society: The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash. In it, the speaker is visiting an elderly loved one (wife? mother? grandmother?) in hospital, but has to communicate with her through a closed window. The chorus has him mouthing the names of her favourite bird and favourite tree to her, because she has forgotten them – the least of her bewilderments. It’s a poem that could only have been written in this awful year when, as Armitage puts it, ‘some of our most innocent and intimate experiences have been outlawed’. You can read it here.

Finally, there was this bitter blast from the ‘Poet Laureate of Twitter’, Brian Bilston. You may feel it’s rather harsh on the prime minister and the government. Or not. At any rate, it’s today’s Poem of the Day.

Daily Briefing

[Insert today’s figure here] people have sadly died.
Responsibility and accountability have sadly died.
Faith in the government has sadly died.
Ministerial integrity has sadly died.
Following the science has sadly died. The exact cause of death is not yet known,
although it is believed to have happened sadly.
Basic governmental competence has also sadly died.
Confidence that tens of thousands more people
may not have to die sadly has sadly died.
It is thought that had any trust in the prime minister still remained,
it would, by now, have sadly died.

In other news, openness and transparency have sadly died;
while satire and irony are also thought to have died at this time,
in a manner which can best be described as sad.
The use of ‘sadly’ as a subtle deflection of blame is yet to die, sadly.