The author and UNHCR ambassador appealed for warm scenes for his poem What You Need to Be Warm – and received ideas from everyone from Ben Stiller to Monica Lewinsky

Coming up with his latest work was “ridiculously difficult”, Neil Gaiman admits. Last month, the Good Omens and American Gods author, who is also an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), asked his Twitter followers to tell him what reminded them of warmth. After receiving almost 1,000 responses – with Ben Stiller and Monica Lewinsky among those to contribute – Gaiman found himself with a 25,000-word document, from which he has composed his newest written work: a freeform poem to launch UNHCR’s Winter Emergency Appeal for refugees across the Middle East.

What You Need to Be Warm touches on everything from “a baked potato of a winter’s night to wrap your hands around or burn your mouth” to “the tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house”.

“It was very intimidating. The original brief was, ‘Can you do a story with a plot?’, and what I’d figured was, we’d get 100 or so replies, I’d pick one that would somehow call to me, and write a short short story. What I wrote was much more of a reaction to sitting and reading 25,000 words of tweets, one after the other,” said Gaiman.

He described the writing process as “like trying to do the world’s most complicated crossword … It was ridiculously hard to write and especially hard when you know one of the engines of – for want of a better word – public poetry, is that it’s not a good idea,” he said. “Anytime you ever see something produced by a poet laureate about any royal event you think ‘Oh no, no’ … It’s that feeling that you’re doomed, but let’s go down as honestly and meaningfully as you can.”

Other suggestions ranged from “the sound of a cat’s purr” to “Grandma’s kitchen in foggy St Petersburg”; “pots of steaming tea so strong the spoon stands up” to “the smell of wet wool over classroom radiators”.

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“What is so beautiful about this is the ways people are describing cold in contrast to warmth. It’s ‘coming in from’, it’s what it’s a contrast to,” said the author. “The biggest problem that the Syrian refugees have right now as winter is starting to hit is you don’t get that change of state. And that means two things: you don’t have a change of state from cold to warm, and you don’t have a state. That’s what it all coalesced around. It was much more of a freeform poem than I’d thought.”

Gaiman’s poem will be knitted into a three-metre UK Solidarity Scarf, by digital knitting machine company Kniterate. It will also feature traditional Syrian floral designs created by women in Azraq refugee camp, Jordan, which will be supported by the appeal.

“We’re in a place right now where public appeals mean something. We have more refugees and displaced people now than since the end of the second world war, and there are funding issues. The hardest part is that it doesn’t get better. They need blankets, warm clothing, thermal linings,” said Gaiman. “Trying to make art in order to get attention for something like this is a very good use of my time.”

• Donations to the UNHCR Winter Emergency Appeal can be made at www.unhcr.org/belowzero or by calling freephone 0800 029 3383.

What You Need to be Warm by Neil Gaiman

A baked potato of a winter’s night to wrap your hands around or burn your mouth.

A blanket knitted by your mother’s cunning fingers. Or your grandmother’s.

A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow

or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen.

The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.

To surface from dreams in a bed, burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,

the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think

just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.

Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.

We travel to an inside from the outside. To the orange flames of the fireplace

or the wood burning in the stove. Breath-ice on the inside of windows,

to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.

Frost on the ground that stays in the shadows, waiting for us.

Wear a scarf. Wear a coat. Wear a sweater. Wear socks. Wear thick gloves.

An infant as she sleeps between us. A tumble of dogs,

a kindle of cats and kittens. Come inside. You’re safe now.

A kettle boiling at the stove. Your family or friends are there. They smile.

Cocoa or chocolate, tea or coffee, soup or toddy, what you know you need.

A heat exchange, they give it to you, you take the mug

and start to thaw. While outside, for some of us, the journey began

as we walked away from our grandparents’ houses

away from the places we knew as children: changes of state and state and state,

to stumble across a stony desert, or to brave the deep waters,

while food and friends, home, a bed, even a blanket become just memories.

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,

to hold out a badly knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say

we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.

You have the right to be here.