Pandemic
Write the shared catastrophe that every household lived differently.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about pandemic experience: grief, distance and strange stillness, with craft techniques, exercises and prompts in this Writory guide.
What this theme is
A pandemic is history happening in your kitchen. That is what makes it unusual material: the catastrophe was planetary, but everyone's evidence is domestic, a birthday sung through glass, a funeral with ten chairs, the supermarket queue spaced like a board game. Pandemic poems work best from this close range. The virus itself is invisible and abstract; the changed behaviour of human beings, the crossed street, the masked smile you learned to read by the eyes, is where the poetry lives.
The theme is really several themes braided: grief, often at a distance and unfinished; fear that made strangers of neighbours; tenderness that found new inventions, chalk drawings, balcony songs, doorstep deliveries; and time itself gone strange, weeks blurring while single afternoons lasted years. A pandemic poem can pull any one of these threads. It should probably not try to pull them all.
Why poets return to it
Poets write the pandemic because it is the largest shared experience of this generation, and shared experience is where poetry earns its keep: readers bring their own locked rooms to your lines and finish the poem with their memories. Writory's judges, scoring emotion alongside craft, consistently see that the pandemic poems which move them are the small ones, one window, one phone call, not the panoramic ones.
There is also the duty of record. Plague years have always demanded their witnesses, and poems keep what statistics cannot: how it felt.
Where it comes from
Plague sits deep in the tradition. Thomas Nashe's 'A Litany in Time of Plague', written in the 1590s while disease emptied London's theatres, contains some of the most haunting lines in English about mortality's fairness. Shakespeare worked through repeated plague closures; some scholars read the sonnets' urgency against that backdrop. Curiously, the 1918 influenza left a thin poetic record, as if the grief arrived too fast for words.
The recent pandemic reversed that silence. Simon Armitage, the UK Poet Laureate, published 'Lockdown' in March 2020, reaching back to the plague village of Eyam and to Kalidasa's ancient Sanskrit poem of a cloud carrying messages between separated lovers. Anthologies gathered hundreds of poets writing the same strange year from different windows.
The elements that carry it
- Windows and thresholds: waving through glass, doorstep parcels, the two-metre gap as a visible unit of love.
- Masks and hands: sanitiser, learned smiles in the eyes, the new choreography of not touching.
- Emptied public space: silent playgrounds, unmarked motorways, cities returned briefly to birdsong.
- Screens as meeting places: pixelated funerals, grandparents rendered in low resolution, the frozen frame mid-laugh.
- Domestic time: sourdough, jigsaws, the same walk daily, calendars gone meaningless.
Techniques that work
- Choose one household-scale scene and stay in it; the global context is already in every reader's head, so you never need to supply it.
- Write distance as image: measure separations in bread aisles, garden fences and phone screens rather than in the word 'apart'.
- Use repetition formally, the same walk, the same room, the same words each stanza with small variations, to enact looped time.
- Handle grief at one remove honestly: a funeral watched on a laptop is its own specific sorrow, not a lesser version of the real thing.
- Date the poem quietly with era-details, a certain slogan, an empty shelf, so it becomes a time capsule without announcing itself.
Mistakes to avoid
- Writing the panorama: deserted globe, weeping nurses, montage strings. Fix it by shrinking to one room and one relationship.
- Borrowed news-language: 'unprecedented times', 'the new normal'. Ban journalism phrases and build your own vocabulary.
- Forced silver linings about nature healing. Earn any hope through a specific observed moment, not a meme.
- Ignoring inequality. The pandemic was not the same event for the nurse, the delivery rider and the homeowner with a garden; know whose version you are writing.
An exercise
Write down five pandemic-era details you have never seen in a poem or news report, things only you noticed in your own home or street. Draft a poem around the single strangest one, keeping the words virus, covid and pandemic out entirely.
A challenge
Write a poem structured as the same short walk taken once a month for a year, one stanza per month, letting the world's changes show only through what the walker sees and passes.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about teaching a child, years from now, what one object from that time was for: a mask with a favourite pattern, a faded floor sticker, a hotel key card from quarantine.
Before you submit
- The scale is domestic; the global stays implied.
- No journalism cliches survive the final draft.
- At least one detail is so particular it could date and place the poem on its own.
- Grief, fear or tenderness is enacted through behaviour, not announced.
- The ending trusts smallness rather than reaching for a grand statement.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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