Write Out Loud showed its support for health workers last year with its Beyond the Storm poetry competition that raised £7,500 for the NHS Charities Together Covid-19 urgent appeal.

Hundreds of health and social care workers have died of Covid after catching it while working and caring for others during the pandemic. Now dismay and astonishment are growing at the news that health workers in England are to be offered a pay rise of just 1%. The poet Antony Owen – interviewed recently by Write Out Loud – sent us this poem. It’s called ‘1%’.

Antony said: “I wrote this poem in about 45 minutes, trying to control the fury. Governments willingly spend so much money on wars that take lives - yet so little on those who preserve lives. My wife is a physiotherapist and I wrote this poem for her and many like her who work tirelessly for people rather than themselves.

“We must make a stand to say that a 1% pay rise is offensive to all the 230-plus NHS workers killed by coming into contact caring for patients and their colleagues who also risk their lives. Covid-19 has cost the equivalent of about 25 years of NHS funding - so what is 1% other than a disgusting kick in the gut for every NHS worker whilst politicians hand out grotesquely profitable contracts to the privileged.”

He added: “What better place to share it than Write Out Loud? We have to be loud sometimes and shout for the overlooked.”

 

1%

by Antony Owen

 

I can barely breathe from the other plague

for the nurse and the curse of caring closely,

who chose not to leave when the data was vague

and Boris trained his face how to gaze morosely.

 

The earth is fat with freshly raised graves

where zoom funeral families bury their braves.

And dishonourable Tories tell honourable stories

from the sales room of data of boastful glories.

 

I imagine a man hold out his arm with EDL tattoo

and a black nurse smiling as she comes to save you.

She is English now for the duration of syringes

I can see the face of Tommy Robinson as he cringes.

 

I picture two hundred and thirty front-line staff

fighting for breath as they morph into a graph.

I think of the farewells blocked by the glass

Of couriered bouquets suffocating on grass.

 

I think of the money we find to fight wars

to take life not give life for the patriotic cause.

What about the commoner and her unvalued breath?

Who will lay a wreath on November 11 for their death?

 

Hear Antony reading his poem here