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Breath, Calm, and a New Collaboration with St Mary’s Hospital
As the year draws in and the light fades towards winter, we have been thinking a great deal about breath. The breath that carries our words. The breath that steadies us in moments of anxiety. The breath that connects us to our bodies when life feels tight in the chest.
The Poetry Pharmacy has been working with St Mary's Hospital chest & allergy clinic, Imperial College NHS Trust in Paddington, to bring four carefully chosen poems into the waiting room of the Chest Clinic. These poems invite a moment of deep, restorative pause for patients, families, and staff. They offer not distraction, but something gentler. A way to breathe with a poem when breathing itself feels charged. We were honoured to feature poems by Imtiaz Dharker, Lemn Sissay, Anne Bronte and Clare Shaw .
The selection includes work that speaks directly to air, stillness, and the solace of the natural world. Clare's poem The Healing of Little Woolden Moss gives us space to wander through wind and quiet green light. It carries the reader into a place where the breath can deepen again. Anne Brontë's lines, shaped by both fragility and fierce clarity, feel especially resonant in a chest clinic, as she faced her own illness with such courage and, like her siblings, was lost to TB.
We hope that these poems may offer a kind of shared exhale within the clinic environment. A moment of release in the long rhythm of waiting. The simple act of reading invites us to slow the breath, to give it its proper measure, and to feel ourselves returned to the present.
This small collaboration with St Mary’s is a reminder of what poetry can do in the world. It can sit quietly beside someone who is anxious. It can steady the pulse. It can help us feel connected to wind and weather beyond the hospital walls.
Can a poem change how you breathe?
Taqwa Sadiq , a young woman living with the exhaustion of long Covid, turned to the words of an ancient Persian poem when she could find no clear path to recovery.
Her story explores how poetry, rhythm and voice can restore a sense of breath and hope. Along the way, she discovers Islamic mystical ideas of breath, the healing impact of literature on the brain, and the unexpected places alternative healing can be found.
Taqwa’s journey brings her into conversation with our very own Pat Edwards from the Poetry Pharmacy, translator Muhammad Ali, and academic and publisher Nick Canty, in this beautiful short programme on Radio 4: Breathing Lyrical, part of the New Storytellers series.
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