A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2022

For World Mental Health Day 2022, a poem called 'There's a kind of sadness', published in Maitri Poetry's anthology, 'Night Sweats of the Spirit' and recorded for its launch.   

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2019

This poem is from my 2016 collection, Breadcrumbs, published by Indigo Dreams. I'm posting it for World Mental Health Day, with the reminder that when you've lived in a familiar situation for a long time, it can be very hard to see just how damaging it is. Also, that writing - or otherwise exploring your creativity - helps (if you're able to do that).

Headland

  

This was no rupture. No sudden loss

that left you stranded from yourself

All the same, the land is gone

He must have filched it with a spoon

so surreptitiously sometimes even now

you don’t perceive its absence as anything

more than a tendency to dream

don’t hear the breach filled with echoing dark,

don’t notice you’ve stopped building boats and bridges

out of stories

©Deborah Harvey 2016

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2017

William Cowper was an 18th century poet and hymn writer, born a generation or two before Blake, Coleridge, Clare and Keats, and like them, posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of course, we can never really know what caused their mental illness and it seems rather prurient to conjecture about this aspect of their lives. In any event, what's more interesting about Cowper is the fact he kept three orphaned hares as pets and found some comfort in caring for them. 

Mr Cowper’s Hares

And so he sits without moving

holds them in his lap

not so tightly they’ll take fright

leap through the window

scream up the lane

outstripping every attempt to catch them

hurling themselves

from rock to moss to wild supposition

till they’ve gone beyond all returning

no longer know they have a home

and not so softly they’ll take fright

bolt down the passage

out through the door

dodging the grasp of passers-by

plunging

almost suicidal into tan pits

brought back half-drowned in a sack

caked with lime

and so he holds them without moving

pent between his hands

sees his reflection

in their mad amber eyes

©Deborah Harvey 2016

This poem won the Hilly Cansdale Prize for Local Poets at Wells Literature Festival last year, and I'll be reading it at the prize-giving ceremony for this year's shortlisted poets, this Sunday at 3.30pm in the Bishop's Palace.