Lockdown by Simon Armitage

                               Experience on Lockdown   

           When the sudden but necessary lockdown was imposed upon us, whole nation was astonished. There was a dilemma in our minds. I was not much worried, after all, how hard could staying at home possibly be? And the lockdown meant to be for a fortnight only, but as the deadly virus spread its claws the reality started to sink in and we were confronted with a problem alien to humanity.

       

        With a few days into the 21-day-long lockdown in India, scores of migrant workers have begun to take the long road home by foot. The daily wage earners have been finding it difficult to return to their hometowns due to the lack of transport services. The migrants citied that landlords were throwing them out as well as lack of food. 

   

        

      Hundreds of people in one bus. The situation was unbearable. No Shelter no food.

 

    

        Workers travelled through cycles to reach their native places. Sudden lockdown was a havoc in India. 

          

         Windows were only one to look outside world through our eyes all were locked in their homes. Second wave was even more dreadful. 

         Thousands of people died in one single day.

Everyday was a challenge. Humans have to take care of him or her self. Scarcity of oxygen cylinders and even scarcity of beds in hospitals. 

         

                     Simon Armitage 

                Simon Armitage on born 26 May 1963 is an English poet, playwright and novelist who was appointed Poet aureate on 10 May 2019.He is also professor of poetry at the University of Leeds and succeeded Geoffrey Hill as Oxford Professor of Poetry. when he was elected to the four-year part-time appointment from 2015 to 2019.

     

Lockdown by Simon Armitage

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth

in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see

the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.

Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line

whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.

But slept again,
and dreamt this time

of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,

streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,

embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,

the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,

the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so

                 Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the UK, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”.

               The poet laureate’s new poem, Lockdown, moves from the outbreak of plague in Eyam in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village, to the epic poem Meghadūta by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa.(Source:-The Guardian)