Golden

By Alison Reed

Alison R Reed works in schools and recently won a national poetry competition. She has had several poems included in local anthologies and is currently compiling her own first collection.

Writing in a pandemic has been a challenge! To begin with, the weather was so glorious that it didn’t feel like a lockdown, in fact it felt like an enforced holiday, but as the weeks went by reality started to bite. My neighbour spent months in and out of hospital with Covid and I couldn’t go to the funeral of a friend who died in March. It was heart-breaking.

We all had to get used to the new ‘norm’ so in between working reduced hours in the school office, I joined all the writing courses I could, watched the National Theatre plays which were streamed online and saw productions that I would never have gone to in the normal course of events. I adjusted to Skype meetings for Walsall Writers’ Circle, and walks and bike rides gave me inspiration for haikus, while lines of poems sprang up unexpectedly when I found a discarded balloon in the garden or watched washing blowing in the breeze. Work on my third novel stopped as I struggled to concentrate on long pieces of writing, but poetry thrived. During this pandemic I won a national poetry competition and have had more work published than ever before.