You may have noticed inspiring poetry around the Met and Ouellette campuses recently.

“Windsor’s Resilient Voices” is an initiative to celebrate National Poetry Month by placing short, six-line inspirational poems on interior advertisement spaces across the Transit Windsor fleet of buses and throughout select facilities beginning April 2021.

Windsor Regional Hospital jumped on board and wanted our staff to see these inspirational messages.

The poems are meant to give staff a bit of a ‘pause’ to remind us that ‘resilience’ is at the core of this pandemic.

The initiative was conceived of by Marty Gervais and local poet and lawyer Peter Hrastovec, who both sought a meaningful way to mark National Poetry Month during the continuing COVID-19 global pandemic. The League of Canadian Poets selected “Resilience” as the theme for National Poetry Month this year, explaining the theme as follows: “What does it mean to be resilient? We meet resilience in every corner we’ve ever been backed into, every hardship that we endure. Resilience is geographical, spiritual, historical. It’s the fight against climate change, the inner battle with mental health, the outcry for human rights, and an end to systemic racism. Resilience is the backbone of generations of trauma, the silence at the dinner table, the bow to culture’s violin. Resilience is the courage to start each day anew. This National Poetry Month 2021, we celebrate, reflect on, and respect the resilience that has made us who we are.”

By placing the selected poems in facilities throughout Windsor, Gervais and Mary Ann Mulhern are taking the opportunity to deliver on the goals of the City of Windsor’s poet laureate program, which include promoting poetry to a wide and appreciative audience while strengthening the public’s relationship to literature. Since the start of the pandemic, the poets laureate have written over seventy poems that have been shared online.

The initiative received some positive feedback from staff noting the poems are “motivational and inspiring.”