Notes to Lonely Poets: Reflections on the WRITE Where We Are NOW archive by Romalyn Ante

In July 2021, Manchester Poetry Library closed the WRITE Where We Are NOW archive after receiving over 400 submissions. The archive was set up to receive without question or criteria any poem on the pandemic people sent us. At the time, we didn’t rule out future publication, but the initial aim was simply to bring these poems together and make sure they will be available for future generations.

Manchester Poetry Library invited the poet Romalyn Ante as our first reader of the archive. Romalyn’s written response, “Notes to Lonely Poets” was first shared exclusively with contributors to the archive in 2023. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Romalyn for her attentive approach to the poetry and to the poets mentioned in the essay for the permission to quote from their work.

For everyone, the effects of the pandemic continue long after the last lockdown ended and the question of what do with the incredible work we were sent was forced to compete first with the energy it took to make a gradual return to the world and consequently what feels like an acceleration of activity to unprecedented and exhausting levels. However, this year we are hoping the project will finally take shape into something permanent and accessible to its contributors and the wider public. Watch this space.

Kind regards,

The Manchester Poetry Library Team

The poems are reflections of everyone’s grief, sadness, anger, and longing. They have become a testament to the resonating power of language, and how it can harness empathy and hope, and the belief that, even after great suffering, there can be renaissance. This essay is written in response to the WWWAN public archive. This is for every poet who participated in the project.

Romalyn Ante on the WWWAN archive

[Content Warning: We would like to draw your attention to the fact that this essay discusses death, grief, trauma and suicide.]

NOTES TO LONELY POETS

Hello there, how are you, dear friend? I hope you are well, wherever you are. I have read your poem—something that I truly needed, in a time like this.

You write:

My camouflage face mask: double-layer

microfibre, wire nose bridge…

Great if you’re in a jungle or forest… [1]

That camouflage image really hit me. How true is it that in a time like this, we’re all soldiers in camouflage? Perhaps not like the ones all geared up for a battle, but the wounded ones–our own hands pressing against our skin to stop the bleeding. We try to stay in nests, our safe nooks and crannies, away from anything—or anyone—that could hurt us.

Have I told you that my mother is a nurse on the frontline? And recently, that is all she can be. I have never seen my mother the way she is tonight: she’s on the phone with someone at our dinner table, her tongue as sharp as a scalpel when she says, ‘What is my name? Staff Nurse Rosana!’

I recognize this manner of speaking. This is how I introduced myself once (when I was a newly qualified nurse) to the doctor I kept bleeping, who would not come up to review a patient whose wheezing was as loud as the wind through pipes in winter.

But, you see, my mother is not on the wards. She is at the dinner table, speaking to a McDonald’s staff member about our take-away meals, their over-diluted cup of hot chocolate.

It is October, and the neighbourhood houses are flickering green and gold with Christmas lights, but who could really rest—or celebrate—at a time like this?

In your poem, you write:

the tally

grows steadily [2]

and so, everyone gets tired. My mother shouts down the phone, ‘Yes, I will get a replacement. It is not free because I paid for it; you just did not do it right!’

She hangs up, slumps her face onto her palms, and murmurs, ‘All I want is a hot chocolate!’

My mother then looks up at me. Her already exhausted face sags. Then she bursts into laughter. Only at this moment has she realised that she introduced herself as Staff Nurse to a McDonald’s worker. Her body is here, but her mind is still at work. Her whole system is still flooded with adrenaline: she is ready to pounce, attack, fight her way out of the net of brambles sinking their thorns deep into her flesh.

There are nights such as this when my mother comes back to the house, but, like a wounded warrior, never fully returns home.

***

You write in your poem:

Young people own the world this evening.

Some sing, too far away for me to hear their words. [3]

These lines give me solace, dear friend. I thought, How beautiful! Even though the words are incomprehensible, the music seems to have reached you.

And shouldn’t language be exactly this way? Full of rigour and power? This reminds me of the concept of kototama which, according to my half-Japanese husband, is the belief that there is magic that lives in words. Do you believe this?

Just like my mother, I used to introduce myself with pride: I am Staff Nurse Romalyn. But recently, I have been afraid—for my mother, for our patients, for the public, for myself. Especially when I think of my chronic lung condition. What if I catch COVID? Will I survive? I was really with you when you wrote in your poem:

once upon a time I was too scared to breathe [4]

How did it come to be that breathing itself can be deemed so dangerous?

As a nurse like my mother, and as a poet like yourself, I know that breathing should be more powerful, freer than this. Breathing contains energy; it gives life to language, which gives life to magic. You might have heard that the Chinese and Japanese words for this breath-energy are qi and ki respectively. My mother once told me a story: there was a scientist named Dr Emoto who had two jars of rice. He yelled at the first jar with anger and blame, while the other one was watered with sweet words, such as I love you and Thank you. One morning, he noticed that the rice he’d showered with positive words were still white, pearlescent, whilst the grains in the other jar had crusted with moss.

***

Earlier, when I turned into the McDonald’s drive-through, my mother noticed an ambulance crew walking inside. She asked the staff in the kiosk window why they were letting people in.

‘Oh, we’re just letting frontliners use our toilets,’ a young blonde woman replied.

‘Well, I’m a frontliner too. Can I go and use your toilet?’

‘No, it is just for the ambulance or police.’

A shadow swept across my mother’s face. ‘It doesn’t matter. You should not be allowing these people to come in and out of your store in the first place. Do you know how many COVID patients those ambulance crews carried into the A&E today?’

My mother is Staff Nurse Rosana, and recently, that is all she ever is. She’s tired of it all; she’s had enough. I wish I could have said something to help her feel even a tiny bit better. But even as a poet I have become unsure whether there is really magic in words, and I too have been afraid to breathe.

***

Nowadays, when my mother returns home from work, she has no energy for other things. She just goes straight to sleep. Tonight, I massage her back with Tiger Balm, as her muscles, ligaments, and tendons have become tense and knotted from her endless, long-day shifts.

Yesterday, another patient died. My mother became so dyspnoeic, breathless, that she had to walk to the staff room, sit down, and lean forward, elbows on the table, to help open her lungs and alleviate the breathlessness. Once, I saw myself in her—in the same position at our dining table—as I let the night’s darkness drown the whole kitchen and I let myself saturate in the salt of my own tears. That was the day I received the news that a young person who used to come to our clinic had been found hanging in her closet with her school tie around her neck. That was the day the second national lockdown came into force.

***

Tonight, at the dinner table, I have tried to change the mood by telling my mother, ‘Forget about the hot chocolate! Can we talk about something nice? Has anything positive happened at the hospital today?’

‘The only positives at the hospital are my patients!’ My mother’s eyes meet mine; she looks like she’s going to cry.

Perhaps this is why I smiled (with both joy and sadness) when I read your words:

It takes no time to be kind

costs nothing to act in kind [5]

I used to believe this too, dear friend. But my mother’s heart has become a bitter melon, critical of the world outside that can’t seem to understand what it is like inside.

Don’t you know how many positive patients that ambulance crew carried into A&E today?

All I want is a cup of hot chocolate.

My mother’s face slumped onto her palms.

***

Who among us has not worried for a loved one in times like this?

In your poem, you write:

You walk between feverfew and glib blossom

fretting about the fragile branches

of your sister’s lungs. [6]

This reminds me of my relatives back home: my auntie Tita Weng, shivering in her unlit room; her face lagging on my phone screen as she lists the symptoms she’s been having for weeks: pyrexia (high temperature), anosmia (loss of smell), dyspnea, lethargy. But she cannot confirm this is COVID. Being unemployed (like many other people in other under-developed countries), she does not have the money to pay for a test. She could not buy a Sats gauge to check if her oxygen levels are dipping; and even if she could, she would not be able to afford hospitalisation anyway. There is no UberEats or Deliveroo to lay packets of food onto their doorstep; her husband and two teenage children are all isolating too, their only way of speaking to each other is through the thin, termite-nibbled walls between the rooms. Tita Weng sustains herself with sips of water. Tita Weng breathes heavily, It’s like a giant is pressing onto your chest… it’s like you’re breathing beneath the soil of your grave, she says.

You wrote:

I think of you

locked in a box-room for months

with only the seeds and birdsong

and blossom bringing you a hint

of distance [7]

This reminds me of an A&E cubicle or an Isolation room my mother always talks about after each shift.

Earlier today, a seventy-year-old couple was admitted. Both positive. Due to the lack of space, they had to share a single side-room, each lying on a single bed.

The ward was a warzone: patients breathing heavily under masks, patients dropping suddenly, red crash trolleys dashing in all directions. By the afternoon, the elderly couple’s side-room call-bulb was constantly blinking red. My mother and her colleagues opened the door to find the old woman weeping, ‘I kept calling you, but none of you came.’ She was out of her bed, her sheet on the floor. She was now sitting at her husband’s bedside. She bent her head, laid her forehead on the back of her husband’s hand, her elbows on his bed.

‘My husband is dead. I kept calling you, but none of you came.’

In battles, there is no time to mourn. More patients’ breathing stopped, more emergency calls were made, more red crash trolleys wheeled across the wards. More shirts are ripped open to reveal pale chests—chests that are pumped in the hope of restarting the caged hearts.

Ma knocked on the door of the side-room to check on the old woman, but when she did not answer, Ma opened it to find her still leaning forward, her hands clasping her husband’s. My mother knew she had died too.

‘Every nurse,’ Ma says, ‘cried in the locker room today.’

Everyone was sobbing while eating their baguettes, chewing their rice, slurping their soup, swallowing their cold sandwiches. The raucous noise of the ward was reduced to chewing, sniffing, the ticking of the clock. Staff Nurse. A title anointed with mourning and impossible endurance.

You write in your poem:

The weight of one body

heavier than two. [8]

And worse, the weight of one absent body, can smother a whole village. When I ask my mother if the elderly woman died of COVID, she says, ‘Of course not. She died of a broken heart.’ My husband agrees. He says that broken heart syndrome is called Takotsubo, a word derived from the pots that trap octopus in rural Japanese fishing. With broken heart syndrome, the left ventricle of the heart enlarges due to acute stress or pain, resembling the shape of the pots.

How do we treat a broken heart, dear friend? Others’? Ours? Forgive me—I want to remember and tell you about my mother’s persistence and resilience—because there are many stories about this—but somehow all I can write about is her exhaustion.

Please know that even after this I still want to believe that there is magic in words; there is energy in breathing. I keep repeating this every morning when I face the mirror: I am happy. I am strong. There’s an English idiom that says Fake it till you make it, right? This must mean that the ancestors of this country believed in the transformative magic in words too, right?

***

When I was a student nurse, my mother taught me to pay attention to how one is speaking or breathing, because that would give you a hint about what they are feeling. I learned to differentiate a patient suffering with sepsis from a patient having a panic attack: the former would normally show tachypnoea–rapid but shallow breathing–while the latter would show hyperventilation, rapid but deep breathing.

When I auscultate a patient’s chest, my mother has taught me that the sounds of a ‘snoring bear in the woods’ or a ‘whistling of trees’ could be ronchi, an indication that the patient’s airways and trachea are thick with mucus. Through my stethoscope, the sound of a seal barking from the bottom of an empty well tells me it’s stridor, an indication of a narrowing or an obstruction in the upper airways.

My mother once said, ‘Observing how others breathe will help you understand what hurts, and so you can devise a care plan to help alleviate their pain.’

***

The past was never pain-free anyway, even before Covid. But I want to believe that a more expansive, free-breathing future can exist again. Like the future you wish for in your poem: it holds ‘music…and trips to the seaside.’ You add:

May the future see us in cinemas

eating popcorn

and rustling sweet wrappers

with someone saying ‘Shh!

I’m trying to watch this film.’ [9]

***

Tonight, this is the only image I can give you: Tia, our black Rhodesian ridgeback, curls beside my mother as I continue to read your poems by lamplight. I thought I must write back to you—wherever you are—because your words somehow comfort me. I want to believe what my mother used to say: that pain is more bearable when you bear it with others, with your friends. So I write back because I know that we understand each other. And even though the shadow of my pen continues to drag, I know that somewhere in some corner of Britain—or on the other side of the world—you are there, another poet who keeps writing, believing in the power of words and breath.

Day by day, the wounds will become more familiar and bearable. Let’s keep writing to each other, even if we never meet. There will be a day as bright as a blank page, as busy and open as a market square, where we can be with the people we love in their truest light—and not as the ‘warriors’ the world is currently asking them to be. There will be an end to this.

For now, I will let your words strengthen me:

Where shall we meet? In Hendaye or Hondarribia?

Shall we meet midway…

…on Santiago Bridge

and run towards each other in slow motion… [10]

Romalyn Ante

[1] Rodney Wood, ‘I’M MISSING THE SWEET SMELLS OF HERBS & SPICES’

[2] Sue Wallace-Shaddad, ‘The Days Ahead’

[3] Sian Thomas, Cuckemere Haven, 20th May 2020’

[4] Priyanka Srivastava, ‘That Art at the End of the World’

[5] Anthony Gorin, ‘Please be Kind’

[6] Yvonne Reddick, ‘Medlock’

[7] Sammy Weaver, ‘A wind-blown seed’

[8] Alison Tanik, ‘Spring, 2020’

[9] Bernard Young, ‘A Bright Future’

[10] Julie Irigaray, ‘Closing the Border’