It was a scary, anxious and humbling time to be working in the NHS at the time the pandemic hit. It was the best of humanity at the worst of times - despair and determination, love and loss, exhaustion and emotion...

I want to share a poem I wrote in May 2021, when I felt the double whammy of the pandemic taking its toll in the UK and then in India where my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins and my school and college friends were living. It had been 18 months by then that I had not been able to see family, and there were days I thought I would never see my father again, alone and scared in Mumbai, listening to stories of death and devastation on a loop all day. This poem captures that awful time when the roads and the air seemed to be filled with hastily made pyres and the acrid smell of death. We can never afford to forget the lessons of COVID-19, where the infirm, the vulnerable and the brave key workers were taken away from us too soon. Having to say goodbye to beloved family and colleagues over Teams and Zoom seems so inadequate and pathetic. I hope they know they were out of sight but definitely in our hearts.

This poem tries to portray my dread and guilt when I woke up every morning wondering what was happening to my family thousands of miles away.

WAITING

Waiting for sunrise

and the calls to start;

Dreading the call.

Yearning for the call.

For the neighbour to say,

"He is breathing, he is eating".

Waiting for the money transfer to go through.

"You need to pay within two hours or lose the bed."

Waiting in the reception for entry into the hospital,

The living and the dead equally silent.

Waiting for air, hell is no oxygen.

"Sorry, ventilator is for four hours only, others are waiting."

"The doctor had a kind voice", she says

While waiting in the corridor for her beloved's body to be bagged.

Waiting in the car park for the cremation,

his body shrouded in her sari.

Ambulance number 1722, token number 284, 42 degrees Celsius.

Dozens of pyres lighting the sky

on the long journey home with an empty house waiting.

Waiting at home, imprisoned by the virus.

Waiting for vaccines without borders

For sharers, not hoarders

For larger hearts, smaller egos.

Meanwhile, we live, work and breathe.

Waiting for the thump-thump of guilt to subside,

For the flood-tide of despair to recede.

Waiting for a different dawn,

Waiting to embrace my motherland and mine.

Ananta D