My name is Podrig Otuma, and amazingly, this is the 10th season of Poetry inbound.

We began in 2020. We'd recorded it all in 2019, not knowing what 2020 would bring.

And during that first season, what moved me so much was hearing from so many people

who were writing to say that a poem meant this thing or something else to them during that terrible time of the intensity of COVID and lockdown and worry.

And I heard from so many people involved in healthcare settings, doctors, cleaners, nurses, patients, families of patients and bereaved people and chaplains.

One fellow wrote to me and said that he'd come home from working in a hospital and look at

his kids from a distance and having seen and contained so much pain and shock and

unknowing during the day and at the same time trying not to pass on his anguish to his kids,

trying to try on some way of being himself that could give some sense of normalcy to them in whatever way he was able.

He was a hospital chaplain, and I've thought about him so often in the years since, because the way that

he reflected back on the poetry that he'd heard made me see poetry in a particular way, the ways that

he was present to his own life, to the life of the people he loved, as well as then to the life

of the people that he was meeting in a hospital. I found that to be such a noble work.

And I suppose in a way, the choice of this poem for Poetry in Bounda Day

is an honouring of everybody who does that in their life, in their work,

the way that they go about their daily business. How to Speak Love in a Storm by Stuart Henderson

How to speak love in a storm depends on the substance of the voice

as the trees rage and roof tiles smash

where seagulls are grounded and there is only chaos. How to speak love in a storm is to put up a signpost

for the lost as on the bitter hillside you lie murmuring,

why is this happening now? Exposure, like a fox, circling your lamb's heart. How to speak love in a storm

means finding the right inflection, not offering words and hollow prayers, but walking backwards with you into your abandoned years. This poem by Stuart Henderson is from an out-of-print book titled Homeland that I have had for many years, almost 30 years, and I know so many of the poems in it of my heart, because I've

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