What story or image comes to mind when you imagine your own mental wellbeing or that of the ones you love?
 
As we celebrate World Health Day on 7 April, The AVBOB Poetry Project features the work of Petros Isaakidis, a Greek-born poet, doctor and epidemiologist living in Cape Town. His extraordinary debut collection, volcanoed, was published by Thraca/Botsotso in 2025. It features poems that appear in both Greek and English, the two languages in which he is fluent, and his dual identities as poet and doctor co-exist on the page. The poems are understated, written in lower case, but deal with large subjects, the death of his father, the complexities of language, identity and migration, and his response to the pandemic.
 
“The emotional hinge was grief, honestly. But the poems aren’t about the eruption, the explosion, the shocking moment of loss. They’re about the aftermath: the slow cooling of lava, when languages, memory, even the body must remake themselves. As for the missing capitals: that was a deliberate breaking of hierarchy and rules. This ‘new language’ didn’t need two types of letters; one, the quieter, was enough to hold unbearable emotions.”
 
Some of the most powerful poems show what happens when he tries to balance his time and attention between two such different disciplines. In ‘why we should have stayed home’, he finds himself inside a hospital during the pandemic. Everyone is “wishing we fought harder”, and screens are “touched more than skin.” Does he believe that a poem such as this can touch people in ways that medicine, or even science more generally, cannot?
 
“Oh, yes. As a doctor and epidemiologist, I remain shocked and ashamed of how fear made us lose so much of our humanity during the pandemic (and how easily we gave up some of our rights). We allowed so many people to die alone. If only we had invested as much in our stories, our principles, our arts as we did in vaccines and clinical trials. Sometimes I’m asked: ‘Do we need more science or more poetry?’ Though either/or questions are often flawed, I wouldn’t hesitate: more poetry.”
 
Asked how we can respond to celebrating World Health Day more creatively, he says:
 
“Across many cultures, health was once taught through tales, songs and embodied rituals. We could revive some of these practices and un-sterilise our current discourse around health, which should be personal as much as it is social and planetary.”
 
His own environmental concerns are perhaps expressed most memorably in a powerful poem called ‘litterate’ in which he argues that human beings’ destruction of the natural world is as much an epidemic as the ones that can be treated medically. It begins:
   
Asked what he sees in his immediate future, he says:
 
“While working on this collection, I became aware of how many binaries I was inhabiting: Greek or English? Scientific or creative writing? Doctor or poet? Personal grief or collective loss? The language binary was the first to break. Perhaps the doctor versus poet divide will be next. For now, I wear one hat at a time, and maybe I’m a little vengeful toward epidemiology and scientific writing for all the years they claimed. I’m open and curious about what comes next. A bit terrified too.”
 
In the next few days, write a poem about a moment when an unlikely person’s story touched you and improved your mental health.
 
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition closed on 30 November 2025 and reopens on 1 August 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and register to enter.