2025 is a special year – Carers UK turns 60! For six decades, we have been standing beside carers, and this year we are celebrating events all across the country. One of the highlights? Our poetry competition. In today’s blog, we are excited to share the winning entry – a powerful, moving poem that captures the heart of caring 

I Carried Him 

by Martin Seare 

I watched the lion stumble.   
Not in some slow fall from grace—   
but a vicious tearing down.   
His body, once god-like in strength,   
betrayed him in silence, in swelling, in stillness.   
His breath thick with carbon, skin screaming with sores,   
and still—   
he was my king.  

Doctors whispered him dead with eyes that never saw me.   
Nurses fussed and fumbled,   
measuring his days in drips and charts,   
while I stood vigil   
on the cliff between this world and the next.  

He slipped,   
and I caught him.  

Not with hands of marble—   
no.   
I caught him with shaking palms and blistered knees.   
With prayers screamed in the dark   
and sheets wrung from sweat and sobbing.  

I bathed the wounds.   
I kissed the fever.   
I spoke to the man inside the ruin,   
told him:   
You do not leave me.   
I will drag you from the edge   
with nails, with love, with rage.   
Because without you, I am airless.   
I am spine without bone.   
I am not alive if you are not.  

They told him he’d never walk.   
But he walked.   
Because I stood behind him,   
spirit braced like stone—   
my belief louder than death,   
louder than the pitiful prophecies   
of white coats and cold machines.  

I saw him reborn,   
not in a cradle of ease,   
but with blood in his mouth and fire in his eyes.   
He stood because I willed the sun to rise for him.   
Because my love   
was the breath in his broken lungs.  

You see—   
I did not marry a man.   
  

I married war.   
I married resurrection.   
And I am not just wife.   
I am battleground.   
I am temple.   
I am nurse, priestess, lover, Mother and shield.  

So let them marvel.   
Let them whisper of miracles.   
But know this—   
He walks because I carried him.   
And I will carry him   
again   
and again   
until the stars forget to shine.