During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020 a group of passionate poets – Nicky Saunter, Andrew Simms and Nick Robins – set up a whatsapp group called One Poem a Week. Each friday we would come up with a word or phrase to inspire the next poem and every week we would share our efforts with each other online.

In those scarey times we sometimes lived poem to poem as the weekes passed. And as we emerged from the pandemic, the poems kept coming. This small volume is from 2020. We stiill write a poem every week for each other and we have published two books, and performed live across the country. Here is a recent addition:

Drenched

You know the first time you feel tropical rain
It makes you laugh, just hoot with laughter
The joke is on you, with your hopes of reaching shelter
Before the mighty heavens crack and broil
Time and wind stops, temperature dips
And we are drenched both to our slick skins
Between the car and the porch overhang
Metres that might as well be miles
Out in the yard with fat drops bouncing up red mud
The earth is alive with jumping water in slo mo
I leap and then you, splashing like tots
Mouths open to the pummelling sky
The rains have come, bringing life and food
Joy runs untrammelled down gutters and pipes
Bubbling hope, spurting fountains alive
And us too, dancing in disbelief.