When the team here at Nothing in the Rulebook first launched our ‘Haikus for the NHS‘ poetry project at the turn of the year, we did so with a simple aim: to show our support, through art and creativity, for one of the UK’s most treasured institutions: the National Health Service.
Quite simply, we have been blown away by the incredible response to our project. While we have now announced the winners, we wanted to share with you the haikus we received that made our short- and long-lists.
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence,” claimed the brilliant poet and political activist Audre Lourde. In these challenging times, we need poetry more than ever before.
This is because poetry is far more than grammar and syntax – the terms and measurements that help us identify and discuss language scientifically. It is more than copy on a page. It is rhythm; it is sensations; it is incantation. And, through this, poetry becomes meaning. It becomes truth.
Poetry’s essence, therefore, produces a visceral effect that can inspirit, inspire, and transform those who read and hear it. And it is this that makes poetry such a powerful tool for speaking out against the wrongs of the day – for channelling the universal human feelings of every man and every woman into something meaningful and real, into a form of protest and resistance.
The poems we have published here – and which we will distribute among the thousands of demonstrators marching on London on 4 March – capture this essential essence of poetry and move us through a range of powerful emotions, all while leaving us with the essentially common strain of thought: that we must fight and do what we can to protect the UK’s National Health Service.
At times, personal, moving, funny, abrupt, stark, visceral and filled with a vehement passion and anger against the incumbent Conservative Government, these poems stood out for us among over 200 submissions as capturing the essential essence of all that is good about the NHS, while also using poetry – specifically, haiku – as protest.
To all those who submitted: thank you. And to those reading now, we hope you enjoy reading these fantastic haikus as much as we did.
The winning haiku
Our shortlisted poems
Selected poems from our longlist are below:
Tories underfund
Our welfare, schools and councils.
At least we have our-
– Daniel Louden
“The Hippocratic oath,
We’ve signed, you haven’t.
Hypocrites”
– Emma Gowen, Suffolk UK
health care . . .
riddled with holes
the open sky
-Ernesto P. Santiago
“We are a first world!”
We cry – unknown is the fact
That we will soon die.
– Katie Bell
slash-and-burn farming— one more NHS service reduced to its cost
-Shrikaanth krishnamurthy, Birmingham UK
My life, again; mine
and untold others, living,
made livable. Thanks.
-Sarah Peploe
Picks you up when all is lost
The NHS, it breathes life…
back into despair
They come through for us
Doctors and Nurses are there
Be there for them, Now!
Tell the children why
You can’t afford their care fees
Bet you can’t do it
– Charlie Rowland
Cut, try to stem a
haemorrhaging system, a
self-inflicted wound.
A tick of the pen
budget slashed to nothing.
No nurse to heal us.
Injured? Take a seat
a small plastic one over there.
Lords sit on velvet.
– Sean Smith
I can’t stop coughing
Unnecessary death sucks
Free health care is cool
– Kaela Starkman
nurses help,
doctors heal patients,
amplify life.
– Karen Rodgers
What is as good as
dead as preventable deaths
the NHS saved?
NATO allies throw
bombs with their talk of markets.
Wrap yourselves in white.
– Maureen Miller, USA
We came in crying
And stay amongst the dying
Care is more than words
Come one and come all
See the power of profit
Stealing from us all
– Joshua Deslatte
No beat of the heart
His on the Surgeons table
Save our NHS
– Louise Burgess
Professional medics
Determined to provide us
Care when we need it.
– Morna Sullivan
We lie ill in beds
They come and make us better
We should care for them
– Joan Barker
They want defunding,
Then complain the NHS
Is under-resourced
I’ve estimated
That without the NHS
I’d have died twelve times
I needn’t cook meth
To pay for cancer treatment
Thanks to free healthcare
Fuck every Tory
Who thinks that dying people
Owe them anything
– Hannah Froggatt
Unsung heroes dedicate their lives
to save us in our desperate hours.
Now we save them.
– Jess Burman
You can only cut
Something so much before it
Slowly bleeds to death.
-David Milligan-Croft.
What does it cost you
To forget the sick and dying?
How much for a life?
Decision makers
Acting in self interest
Will not heal the poor
– Andrea Mbarushimana
Beds and meds, they said,
Free to rich and poor alike
Don’t ruin that now.
– Juliet Staveley
Live without fetters:
Shoulder health and happiness
From cradle to grave
The day our children
Second guess their pains for fear
Of cost, all is lost
– John Blackmore
From the Blitz it grew,
They said it would be bomb proof.
We will be the shield.
All the blue Tories
Profiteering wantonly,
We’ll show the fuckers!
– Robert Holtom
Why our tempers fray?
Missus May, your trolley waits
and botched service rates
She has turned back time:
the dark days of the 90’s
where people die young
– Freya Scott Broomfield
For our NHS
Humanity that binds us
It cannot be lost
Quietly you sell
Our rights, in parts, Theresa
Know that we see you
Cold hard cash, money
Its so little to pay for
Lives, humanity
– Eva Reed
The dream of caring
Was gone in seventy years.
Leaves fall; the sun sets.
– Melody Clarke
they want to privatise
So they deprive the barely alive
Keep Britians pride alive
– Alina Ahmad
Death, disease
Hardship, pain
This is not a third world country
It’s 2017, in the UK
– Michael Gerard
To have forgotten
What it’s like to sleep soundly.
Poor Prime Minister.
– Shane Young
To cut health funding
you save little, and you lose
a nation of lives.
Her hand may subtract
health from the nation, but we;
the world! will stop her.
Hearts worldwide will stand
and join hands in waiting rooms
for the NHS.
– Courtney Lisa Minto, Australia
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