LIVING in lockdown has unleashed the talents of budding artists, poets and photographers across the borough with many more sending in submissions to our lockdown art archive – a collection of artwork chronicling the lockdown in Islington.

Jack Harris has continued to send us his daily painting from a series focussing on flowers:

Canonbury artist Gary Power, who kick started our archive, has sent in another recent work completed during lockdown, titled ‘Waiting‘:

And Sandra Thwaites has sent in a lockdown poem, focussed on the situation found inside hospitals during the coronavirus crisis:

The Hospital

No noise outside – an empty space

Emergency sirens now displaced

No outpatients, no voices raised

A normal routine in disarray

No gifts in hand

Visitors are banned

Large posters hang in bright yellow colours

Instructions for your social use

How to sneeze and cough with care

Wash your hands, it’s not a dare

Across the street and by the school

A rainbow flutters in the breeze

Our heroes acknowledged on the frieze

Once inside the corridors are marked

Stand here, not there, wish it was a lark

Wear a mask an apron too

Protect yourself it is the rule

Behind closed doors the industry begins

Saving the lives of next of kin

Staff work long hours on Corona wards

Isolated with no time to pause

Deliveries arrive, food for the day

Generosity is the local way

Charities responding to a unique demand

United together for a joint response

Shared gratitude from previous strangers

Death creeps along the lonely corridor

Up the lift and onto the wards

Behind the doors the virus lives

Attacking the acute, the old, the wise

But death will fail in its plight

The victim’s hand is in my grasp

No further fright, peace at last

Not alone and still time to fight

Together we will all unite.

To contribute to the Islington Tribune’s lockdown art archive, please email your poems, photographs, paintings and crafts to sferguson@islingtontribune.com.