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Yesterday the government announced that the curriculum for next year’s GCSE’s have been amended with Poetry being one of the topics that will become optional. This follows concerns that schools may not be able to cover all areas, because of the pandemic. This coincided, incidentally, with an online conversation I’d had with friends just the night before about a poet I had discovered, Rupi Core an Indian-born Canadian writer. The responses to my discovery were mixed, one friend read one of Core’s poems immediately and declared, ‘I don’t get it’, another said ‘poetry is not for me’. There’s no doubt that poetry can be hard to grapple with, but without the space to explore and study it, in school; the opportunities for people to “get it” and find something in it, may mean the richness of poetry is lost to a generation. Poetry is a way of telling stories; that Lends itself, to keeping things open, to questioning and grappling with uncertainty. It allows the expression of our deepest emotions of elation, or of struggle like Maya Angelou who wrote ‘And still I Rise’ in spite of her experiences of oppression. Or the emotion of overwhelming grief like the poem ‘Stop All the Clocks’ by WH Auden which features in the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. Poetry highlights the truth often from a new perspective, when we are struggling to gain clarity. The Psalmist knew the power of poetry to voice his personal anguish ‘out of the depths I cry to you O Lord’, he said in Psalm 130 to express his sinful plea for mercy and pardon. The Psalm 57 expresses, on the overhand, the confidence and joy of knowing God’s steadfast love and forgiveness ‘for great is your love, reaching to the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies’. There can be immense transition and growth through poetry; perhaps it’s no surprise that as we live through this extraordinary time of uncertainty, people are reaching to poetry to respond to the experience. University Students in Manchester have initiated ‘Capturing Covid-19 Through Poetry’ reflecting their thoughts on the complex, ever-changing world. It may be that decades from now, we’ll look back and read poems about the pandemic and find in them a voice for healing, hope and human flourishing.