Here comes the skivers’ song, again. 
The tune’s a long-lived so and so. 
it travels fast from brain to brain

and sets a story on the go:
the quasi-sick. Day in, day out.
The rhetoric clings like mistletoe:

alm-swallower and layabout. 
On it drones, won’t leave us be. 
It’s long on hearsay, short on doubt.

One chord for a polyphony 
of beings, past and present tense. 
Afraid to lose their leper’s fee

and stunned by Christ’s malevolence
suave beggars dash away from health – 
the restoration of a sense –

in case work interferes with wealth.
The figures flee. Their ailment’s brief.
They force on me a shadow self

I do not want. I’m not a thief. 
Like them I’m squint, (my private word,) 
and still I live with this belief.

So while these ghosts are disinterred,
dissected, glossed, as light relief
once more the song is overheard

on last night’s bus. She’s lost the source, 
but she is quick. “Not you, of course.”

It’s older than the begging bowl — 
almost as difficult to thole.

Strong. Harder to withstand than pain, 
here comes the skivers’ song, again.

Nuala Watt lives and works in Glasgow. Current interests include visual impairment as a creative context and the relationship between disability and parenthood. Her collection The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish was published by Blue Diode in February 2024.

Poetry submissions to thursdaypoems@gmail.com