Something a little different this week, as I’m visiting my son in Portugal.
Poetry commissions have long been a part of my output. The earliest commissions were site-specific: poems for the Dover to Folkestone cycle path, seven sonnets for Herne Bay. One of the latter was so successful, as a standalone piece of work, that it has become one of the two poems that will outlast me: ‘How to Leave the World That Worships Should’ has appeared on postcards and tote bags, been set as the unseen poem on both GCSE and ‘A’ Level exams in England, and been the subject of a podcast. I used to occasionally Google its title to see how far around the world it had reached (India, Australia); my favourite discovery was that it had been shared on the forum of Barnsley F.C. Supporters Club.
Not all of my commissions have quite this level of accessibility and reach, but I’m always aiming to communicate beyond the limitations of the project.
Recently, I had an unusual commission: attend a day, listen to project presentations, and at the end of the event (after an hour of writing in a private space) deliver a poem that pulls all the strands of the day together. I’ve done this twice before; once for the NHS and once for Arts Council England (an audience of 800 Arts Council officers!). It’s a nerve-racking gig to be sure. But it fits well with the creative practice I have lived and taught for decades, which is to put oneself under pressure and then allow whatever words come to flow through you. You have no choice but to accept whatever comes in that hour: writer’s block isn’t an option!
The poem recorded here contains numerous phrases spoken by the community researchers who were presenting the results of their year-long projects into understanding how marginalised groups can better access the NHS. It was written in 55 minutes and then delivered live ten minutes later. Several members of the audience ended up in tears and asked to hug me afterwards, which, to me, is the sign of a poem that’s fit for purpose. And as usual, it aims to reach a little wider than the commission itself. How successful that is, is for you to judge.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Hello Human
How do we measure humanity?
Do we weigh up their worth?
Do we ask, how long have you lived here?
What colour is your skin?
Is your body designed to give birth?
Yes, present statistics.
90% need translation.
1 in 4 need a test.
More than half are depressed.
But what is it that connects us?
Pain in the joints.
Another sleepless night as we fret, When
will I get an appointment?
Not yet, not yet.
And the barriers loom up:
the language, the jargon, the system
that never connects us to a human.
How do we measure humanity?
In years of service?
In inches of pain?
In the grams of salt in a Caribbean curry?
In how long they waited for a bus, in the rain?
In whether they prefer a letter to an email?
In whether they have the money for fruit?
In whether they have diabetes, hepatitis, or HIV?
In whether, when faced with a website, they know what to do?
Can we measure their resilience?
Can we measure their art?
Can we measure their patience?
No, but we can measure the regular beats of their heart
and we can say, Hello human.
We can give them our time.
We can listen, and hear them.
We can say— and mean it— “Your life is as valued as mine.”
How do we measure humanity?
We listen to a person’s voice
We uncover their story
We peel away the labels we’ve placed on them—
elderly, migrant, menopausal, black—
and we see, beneath that: human being.
Someone who loves and is loved.
Someone who hurts and yearns,
and wants to be heard.
We tell their stories:
sitting like a statue, not knowing the tongue,
living on a knife edge,
always one wrong move away from no roof.
With their stories, we empower them.
With their stories we connect their voices
to a thousand ears who know the same feelings.
We peel away bias and blindness, we say “hello, human.”
How do we measure humanity?
The question is nonsense.
How is it that society values one more than another?
The one who got broken, sleeping in a doorway.
The teenaged mother.
The showman whose lights and thrills
create teenage kisses and his own depression.
The Afghan woman as devalued by her husband
as she was by the Taliban.
Humanity cannot be measured, or if it can
then its units don’t change.
On the scales of humanity
we all weigh the same,
no matter our colour, our gender, our language, our name,
how far we have travelled,
how resilient we are with our pain,
we are on an adventure. We connect, with love.
Hello, human.
