BATTLE LINES

As of today’s date, the UK has recorded 129,044 cases of coronavirus with 17,337 deaths. Upwards of 90 NHS staff have died of the virus while ministering to the sick.

The picture below, coupled with the images invoked by Wilfred Owen's war poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, inspired my poem, NHS, which you can read below.

The italicised lines at the start are Owen's words. The title of his poem, in turn, uses the words, in Latin, of the Roman poet, Horace. 

NHS

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning …

The ward is a war-zone, a battlefield

where daily dies our confidence, 

our grounds for hope, our energy.

Each start of shift, we rise to face

an enemy whose strength exceeds

our fearful expectations.

Poorly equipped, still we advance,

driven by our integrity,

while, on all sides, the dying plunge

downward through a corrupted sea,

their last breaths greenly frothing out  

from choked throats as they spiral down.

Our masters moralise and watch,

hand-wringing as the casualties

increase in numbers day by day.

Spruce Generals, they spend hours with charts 

while we must soldier on each day.

To those who fill the wards, the sick,

for whom there is scant hope, we fight,

but these are not good deaths, instead

men thrash in panic towards the end

as a green sea invades their lungs.

We do our utmost, still they die,

the old, the hardly old, the young.

Through night-shift trenches, barbed-wire days,

we grimly trudge, barely awake,

round-shouldered, prematurely old,

towards our shift-end scrubbing-down,

a brief respite and restless rest.

The virus takes no prisoners

and those it spares are subtly changed:

their swagger gone, they rise each day 

aware of their fragility

while, night and morning, we return,

dog-tired, to grapple with our fear

because there are no conscripts here.