Led by The Wordsworth Trust, as part of the Reimagining Wordsworth Project, our nurses took part in a poetry workshop as part of a training day.

Our nurses are with families through some of the darkest hours, offering emotional support as well as physical care.  They are highly skilled and much of their ongoing training is necessarily in clinical techniques. As the care they give is holistic, their personal well-being and development is also important.

Used positively, words have the power to soothe and to offer healing; to enlighten and encourage; to inspire and to move emotionally. Individuals from all walks of life can be inspired by the power of poetry. At the end of the workshop our nurses were amazed they had written this poetry together using their memories of place and emotion.

This poem is was created collaboratively by our nurses. We hope you find it as inspirational as we find them.

Engagement Officer and workshop leader, Tom Langridge, said  ‘Running a Wordsworth-inspired poetry session with Hospice at Home West Cumbria nurses in November was an absolute treat. We wrote sensory poems to explore language and feeling, lookeWordsworth Trust Logod at the stories behind some of Wordsworth’s most moving works, and to cap it all created a beautiful group poem ‘New Life Begins’, with everyone enthusiastically contributing lines and ideas to the finished work. I was so impressed by the group’s openness to a wide range of poetry and creative activity and look forward to some exciting collaborative work in the new year’.

Thanks to Tony at Red Onion Video for helping us to put together this video.