Alec Finlay has had Covid19 since just before the UK went into full lockdown in March 2020. Finlay is part of a high-risk group and the virus has had a significant impact on his body, leaving him unable to walk more than 150m. During lockdown, no matter how ill, he wrote one short poem every morning. The following are some of the entries from his daily poem-journal, presented in chronological order.
lock-down back-garden: a coronavirus journal
16.III.20 – 31.VII.20
a dove on the door
of those about to die
*
the sag in the quilt
must be my knees fault
*
will you allow me
in your bubble?
are our two house-
holds one home?
*
I say I feel
like an old Polo
swopped
for a Trabant
he says Trabants
run for ever
*
you can meet one
parent in the morning
one in the afternoon
and both apart
*
I understand you
very well, better than you
understand yourself
*
now it’s kid’s rules:
everyone (except some)
*
nicola’s manifesto
if your life
is normal
something’s wrong
*
the odd walker on the path
with an aura of danger
*
I’ll call it my grianan
this futon I drag
around the room
in a fold of sunbeams
grianan, Scottish Gaelic: a topographical term meaning sunny spot
*
she says every
catastrophe
carries col-
lateral beauty
*
i.m. John Conway
in his game
each cell with
one or even
no neighbours
died of loneliness
*
take your water
with a pinch
of ascorbic
do as the tea
says: breathe
deep
*
at the zoo the talk is of
feeding animals to animals
*
he says he hopes
I am as healthy
as a cucumber
so I sit a little longer
in the window sun
*
at 60 you have 6
problems they say
at 70 you have 7
and 54 at 54
*
her cold-water cure works for
pain as well as melancholy
*
after Mandelstham
the first apple
speaks as it ripens
the second apple
listens as it falls
the third apple under-
stands as its eaten
*
if you can walk
a half mile
places connect
if you can walk
100 yards
then that’s it
*
life with lock-
down (37): more
notebooks, brassier
birds, less breath
*
OVER-
a friend’s
death
LAYS
the term
of a birth
*
eachy peachy
one side says
no better
pear plum
one side says
no worse
*
days in the week:
scant good in
a slew of bad
*
for this first-waver
long chain replication
pushes the pain
through day 60
*
flipping the journal recto to face
recto to pass into spikes of pain
*
my wee world will stay wee
but what of my hurt heart?
*
she dreams we
held hands
in the undersett
of a tartan rug
*
she says he’s
not the battle
he’s the battle-
field
*
everyone’s out
strimming
with their hair
too long
*
my body speaks
does yours hear?
*
here is your Google
Location History
data for May: a red
dot without a line
*
these morning poems
they don’t write
themselves you know
*
the thing about an anchor is
at a gentle angle it can be lifted
*
the drawing gone wrong
becomes the loveliest
paper for lists
*
counting the days
‘til the back
channel meds
pop through
my letterbox
*
I can see the sea but it’s so long
since I could walk to the harbour
*
here’s to love,
pure breath, and
a bolt of sun
up your arse
*
raise the arms
over the head
palm-to-palm finger
tips holding a beam
let the body open
*
the postures we make
the postures we take
the postures we keep
*
the tiger in the tank
(the thorn in the paw)
*
snuck behind
the cause
is the cause
of the cause
*
filling out my PIP
form in pencil
there’s no tick-box
for ‘in the sun’
*
they’re already div-
iding the old
fatigue from the
new fatigue
*
a tick
for the walk
to the post box
with my PIP form
*
day 6 of the off-
label trial:
less sore, more tired
and my muse
is depleted
*
3 days recycling in the hall
by the door is my jenga
*
the sunset turns
pink for next-
doors long drawn-
out orgasm
*
spread
the economy
open up
the virus
share
the pain
*
100 days on
the level with
the birds
in my window
*
she feels the pain
of ageing and not
remembering nouns
*
my friends who are ill
find my essay comforting
those who are well
find it worrying
*
some days what you most want
is just to know your own username
*
a wedding air –
prophetic and tender:
Niel Gow’s ‘Lament
for the death
of his second wife’
*
before summer’s out
clear the path
I’ve an e-scooter to go
where my legs can’t
*
shame is
shame is
shame is
no use
*
people with phones walking dogs
people with dogs walking phones
*
this machine
could have been
made for me –
it has no
battery
*
herbs to thin
the blood
shrooms to un-
flame the brain
*
laying their maps
miles on his
tiny loop walks
scale strips the glories
*
the child knows injuries –
what this the owl needs
is a bucket of worms
to treat its release
for Poppy
*
Alec Finlay
16.III.20 – 31.VII.20
All images © Alec Finlay 2020
...
Alec Finlay (Scotland, 1966) is an internationally-recognised artist and poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. Much of Finlay's work considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape and ecology. Through permanent and temporary interventions, integrative web-based projects, and publications, Finlay weaves together generous experiential works, often collaborative, sometimes mapped directly onto the landscape, embedded socially or accessed online. Recently Finlay's work has focussed on place-awareness and ecopoetics.
Early in the pandemic, Finlay produced a Creative Tool Kit, a collaborative post with creative ideas to make a prolonged period of isolation easier to bear. Later during lockdown, Finlay wrote an essay ‘On Not Walking’ which reflects on how the virus affected his walking, and details his personal journey of pain cycles, recovery and relapse, both in relation to his original illness, M.E., and while suffering from long-term coronavirus. He also wrote the essay I’m protecting myself but I don’t feel protected published by Disability Arts Online and who describe it as ‘a timely reflection on the coronavirus crisis, the invisibility of disabled people and the absence of our voices in the face of what society could learn from our experience if there was less of a drive from the mainstream media to bury its heads in the sand.’ For other writings on disability, access, landscape and Covid-19 please see https://www.dayofaccess.co.uk/
Alec Finlay was selected for a 2020 Cholmondeley Award.
Selected works are available from Edgework
