Support our Children’s Emergency Fund help to address the immediate and long-term threats of COVID-19. We’ve made huge progress in the last twenty years on children’s rights and COVID-19 risks reversing this progress.” CHILD Send me a hug from the sky And tell me that everything will be alright Im tired of leaving a life full of lies And pretend that everything is going. Over 1.5 billion of the world’s children have been out of school for significant periods of time and millions are being driven into extreme poverty and face a very uncertain future. And in practice, Every Thing Will Be Fine wears a certain preciosity on its sleeve, starting with the title, with its deliberately broken Everything, oy. "This is not just a health crisis, but a threat to children’s rights. “It is so important we listen to children directly during these unprecedented times-we are not all affected equally, and children can be particularly vulnerable. “These powerful poems show the enormous impact coronavirus has had on children’s lives, as well as their strength, resilience, and hopes for the future,” said Yolande Wright, Save the Children’s Director of Inclusion. UME Everything will be fine Sara Vander Zwaag We’re already The next day waits for me to serve breakfast in a blue dish. Never before have so many children been out of school at the same time. I know it is not true but nevertheless while I am in what John Gardner calls the dream of its narrative I am once again prepared to believe it and live it a little stronger perhaps in the moments after reading it as I pad downstairs to make coffee.Because of the COVID-19 crisis, children’s lives and futures are on the lineĪs COVID-19 continues to have devastating consequences for children and their rights, 1.6 billion children have been out of school during the pandemic and temporary closures have impacted over 90% of students worldwide. I like this kind of bravado in a poem, albeit in a tone of low-key assertion. The poem insists ‘There will be dying, there will be dying’ but immediately skirts round the issue. Other friends and relatives have died, two especially close friends in as many weeks earlier this year. The opening and closing sequences of 'Every Thing Will Be Fine,' the first fiction feature from German director Wim Wenders in almost a decade, are among the most masterful he’s created, and over the course of his long career he’s created quite a few such scenes and, more to the point, quite a few such whole films. The day I was told I was well again a young poet friend of mine took her own life. Now of course I am returning to the poem as a middle aged man and I read it completely differently. I can’t help wondering how different my life would have been not to have known him and not to have seen The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry sticking out of his pocket one night at a Durutti Column concert.Īs Raymond Carver says in his essay ‘Fires’, I am talking about real influence here, decisions you make as a young person when you do not really know what you are doing but feel kind of right, like forming a band or deciding to move away from home, the consequences of which you cannot know at the time but which later seem to contain the essence of the matter of life and death. People might be learning new things Persuing their hobbies But the most supreme thing that one has learnt Is humanity. I loved it so much I stole the title and final line in my poem ‘Here’, the final poem in my first book of poems How Far From Here is Home. As I have written before, I owe my discovery of many of the poets who influenced my early publishing and subsequent first book to my friend the furniture maker and designer Duncan Kramer. My reaction on reading it is was a kind of falling in love, infatuation followed by obsession, taking the book in which I found it (a library copy of his Selected Poems) everywhere and checking every ten minutes to see if it was still there. I first read Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’ as an undergraduate, somewhere towards the end of my degree, at a stage of life when everything did indeed seem hopeful and untainted by disaster and breakdown.
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