Back in February, a call went out on Twitter to share poems as part of something called #poeticnursingheart. I\u2019m not a nurse, but I work closely with students and staff from nursing and other health professions. My role is as a librarian supporting the Health and Wellbeing programmes at the Medway campus. This idea of the Poetic Nursing Heart appealed to me both personally and professionally.<\/p>\n
I tried to think what to share. It was tricky. As I said, I\u2019m not a nurse. So I thought a little bit more and made a decision. I decided to share a piece I wrote from a service user\u2019s perspective, when I was first diagnosed with depression and generalised anxiety disorder \u2013 \u201cThe Flame\u201d. We know it\u2019s supposed to be ok not to be ok, but it took me quite some time to click the \u201cTweet\u201d button and share it with the world. To be vulnerable. The response was warm, which drew me in further to the idea.<\/p>\n
Sadly, I was only able to pop in to the Poetic Nursing Heart symposium at Medway briefly, in a window of time snatched between a teaching session and a programme committee meeting. But as soon as I entered that room, I was engaged. Clearly, everyone there was interested, supportive, open. People shared their own work and the work of others. Poems that moved them to tears, made them think or expressed something of what being a nurse meant to them. That brief time meant that I \u201cgot it\u201d just a little bit more – not the professional statements of what nursing is, but the beating heart of authentic nursing.<\/p>\n
I shared another of my poems there. A more light-hearted one which I had used to try to get humour to banish the worst bits of living with GAD \u2013 \u201cReasons To Be Fearful?\u201d. This was the first time I\u2019d ever read it to anyone. But this felt safe.<\/p>\n
![If These Books Could Talk<\/a>\u201d. To me, it ended up sounding a little pretentious. But then, I do have to accept that I can be a little pretentious sometimes\u2026<\/p>\nSo for me, #poeticnursingheart is partly about vulnerability. About being vulnerable – allowing people to see the man, not just the librarian. About the vulnerability of others. And about the mutual acceptance and support that goes with it. In a small way, it has changed me. And I don\u2019t think anything other than poetry could have achieved it in the same way.\u00a0 I look forward to seeing how this continues and to being part of it as it develops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in February, a call went out on Twitter to share poems as part of something called #poeticnursingheart. I\u2019m not a nurse, but I work closely with students and staff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3361,"featured_media":1341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-partners-in-learning","category-poetic-nursing-heart"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Claire Haines","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/481\/2018\/04\/PNH-Blog-Image.png","postExcerpt":"Back in February, a call went out on Twitter to share poems as part of something called #poeticnursingheart. I\u2019m not a nurse, but I work closely with students and staff […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3361"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1590,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions\/1590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/partnersinlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/liblearnteach.files.wordpress.com\/2018\/03\/if-these-books-could-talk.png\"){kind=link}