Simon Armitage’s latest poem, a “bullet / with cancer’s name / carved brazenly on it”, is yet to be printed or read aloud by the poet laureate from the stage. Instead, the work has been engraved by micro-artist Graham Short on to a 2cm x 1cm chemotherapy pill, in what Short said was probably the hardest job had had ever done.

Entitled Finishing It, the poem – Armitage’s second as poet laureate – was commissioned by the Institute of Cancer Research in London. It is intended to symbolise the new generation of cancer treatments that the Institute’s planned Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery will create, and which it hopes will turn cancer into a manageable disease.

“I can’t configure / a tablet / chiselled by God’s finger,” writes Armitage. Instead, the poet has crafted “the sugared pill / of a poem, one sentence / that speaks ill // of illness itself”.

Running to 51 words, the poem was given to Short to engrave on a replica chemotherapy pill, which is intended to represent the drugs that the Institute hopes to develop in the new centre.

‘Here’s an inscription’ … one side of the pill engraved by Graham Short. Photograph: John Angerson

“The pill kept crumbling and it was so difficult to do,” said Short, who swims 10,000 metres a day to lower his resting pulse rate, and works from midnight to 5am to avoid vibrations from passing traffic.

“I work in an unusual way, wearing a stethoscope and taking tablets to get my heart rate down to 20-25 bpm. What I’m trying to do then, using very fine needles, is engrave between heartbeats.”

Short’s tablet will be displayed in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery when it opens in 2020. Currently under construction – and still requiring an additional £14m in donations to be completed – the centre is intended to bring together hundreds of scientists to collaborate on a programme that will overcome cancer’s ability to develop resistance to drugs.

‘It was so difficult to do’ ... Graham Short. Photograph: John Angerson

Armitage said: “Science and poetry are closer associates than many people assume, and it was exciting to work on a project that deals with cutting-edge medical research. And like science, poetry is a ‘what if’ activity, imagining outcomes and possibilities based on creative thinking.

“I liked the sense that poem and pill might collaborate to produce both a medical and emotional cure, and that something so minimalist could aim to bring down something so enormous and destructive. I experimented for a long time with the language – the shortest poems are always the hardest to write, their smallness making them so much more conspicuous and vulnerable.”

Dr Olivia Rossanese, who will be head of biology in the new centre, said that Armitage’s poem “beautifully shares our story and symbolises the hope of what’s to come, the message made more powerful by being engraved on a pill that represents the kinds of treatments that we will be developing in the very near future”.

The centre, she added, would “offer a completely new and remarkable way of working”, with computational biologists, geneticists, evolutionary scientists and drug discovery researchers “all working hand-in-hand in an unprecedented way”.