The Crick – Will Harris I didn’t expect to be nervous. In the morning, light shone through the coloured glass.I was nervous, but happy. After losing auntie, after losing my best friend, I said please don’t point your temperature gun at my head. We watched the news. We worked 84 hours a week and only received a rainbow badge. He lost his work overnight. Never ending screen time. I’ve not danced with anyone in a year. My daughter was born. I got to know the shops in Wood Green. Four cabs, that’s how many I tried to flag down to get here. Don’t know how they knew. Was it my hair? My skin tone? I wore shades to hide my eyes. A snow moon hung over London as I travelled home. It looked like I felt. Listen to the poem here Artistic Statement ‘The Crick’ draws on response data collected from visitors to The Crick Institute during its vaccination program, and an interview conducted with a volunteer. As much as possible, I tried to avoid imposing my preconceptions on these responses. But I was struck by the overriding sense of anxiety they contained. This seemed to stem less from a fear of being vaccinated than from the ongoing trauma of the past year. It felt – and still feels – important not to ‘close off’ this trauma, either through over-interpretation or by offering a false sense of consolation. I decided to keep to the language of the responses, only altering personal pronouns and syntax where appropriate. I wanted the multiple voices to come together of their own accord, expressing the simultaneous anger, grief and hope of this moment. Formally, short lines felt appropriate. Sentences stutter and break off, as if unable to carry the weight of their experience. There’s hurt in these words, but also the strength that comes from expressing that hurt openly. Artist Bio Will Harris is a London-based writer and the author of RENDANG, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020. Read the other poems here: Survive(d) – Hanna Ali Of Partings & Preludes – Momtaza Mehri ধন্যবাদ – Nazneen Ahmed MementoUs – Keisha Thompson Now এই সময় – Eeshita Azad Iftiin Baa Ii Soo Baxay – Ibrahim Hirsi The Crick – Will Harris Purgatory – Fathima Zahra Crick Institute Vaccination Centre Poem – John Hegley Cibaaro | Phenomenon – Mohamed 'Haykal' Abdi A Mnemonic Device – Clare Pollard চাবি | The Key – Shamim Azad Back to the project overview