We knew how to make it
The NHS is a talisman.
The stories lose their anchor in these winds.
What we love is stripped of function
then revealed anew.
What we had done was magicked from our hands.
Is this too much to ask:
on our skew-whiff plot of blather,
can we make the motor go again
when we’ve forgotten how,
heads together, all found in the task?
It’s both new and old,
this line from the physician and the midwife
to the app and back again,
stopping on the way to listen
to patient, neighbour, child and citizen.
Then get what wants telling told.
Steve Griffiths is a poet and former poverty and health inequality researcher, always a campaigner. His Weathereye: Selected Poems appeared last year. www.stevegriffithspoet.com
[…] New Boots and Pantisocracies have published my spell for remaking the NHS, celebrating the qualities that once we could called on. https://newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/postcards-from-malthusia-day-seventy-six-… […]
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