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Bath and North East Somerset Libraries

Lockdown Poetry Runner Up


Lockdown, by Rachel Dennis

This poem is read by Sophie Dumont, a Bath-based poet affiliated with Bath Spa University

The Poem

She prepares to sleep. She opens the window to maintain an optimal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius. She hears a gush, a flood of water pouring into next-door’s  fishpond. She is reminded of Victorian toilet blocks, with chain  pull flushes and cisterns that never fill.  She goes

downstairs.  She turns on her mobile phone. She sends a text. Silence is restored. She gets into bed. She prepares to sleep. Her body is taut. She is hot and her legs are restless. Her mind is full of statistics. She adds the number of her husband’s daily sighs to the day’s death toll, subtracts

the number of tins of beans in the cupboard and multiplies it by the number of days it has been since she last drank a cappuccino. The figure she reaches is beside the point. She tells herself that worrying and fretting will not achieve the dream of getting to sleep. She tries counting sheep but her ears are assaulted

by the PA from the adjacent train station, the disembodied voice penetrating the black-out blindness of her bedroom. Who is he talking to, she wonders? There shouldn’t be any people on the platform in these lockdown days. She thinks about her cat, who is nearly 16. That day the cat had experienced an episode of vestibular

disturbance. She sees again the poor creature wobbling on her back legs, her pupils enlarged with fear and confusion. Via video conference, the vet thinks it a one-off, but she knows the eventual outcome. Her mind ruminates over death, disease and the dismantling of her life as she knows it. She turns to the left. She turns to the

right. She lies on her back. A freight train squeals to a stop in the depot, its wagons clanking one by one. In the distance she hears the faint wail of a siren, an ambulance carrying another COVID19 case to the hospital, another patient alone in a time of crisis who cannot be held or comforted by those they love. She wishes she could

click her mind to sleep mode. She wishes she could relax but there is nothing to be relaxed about. She hears her husband’s gentle snores. She gets up. She goes downstairs. She sits on the sofa. The cat jumps up on to her lap. She caresses the cat’s old bones. She closes her eyes.