TOIL

You used to work once.
In a bank perhaps, a school,
or on a building site.
Your work had name and status
in which you dressed every morning.
I am a carpenter, you’d say,
a mathematician, a housewife,
an HR consultant.

Now your work is laying a bedsheet
on the floor, heaping it with the objects
you can’t bear to leave behind:
family photographs; letters; addresses;
a candle-holder your daughter made;
your favourite book; a change of clothes;
if you are lucky, some money
and jewellery, stuffed into a sock;
your phone; food which won’t moulder.
Your job is to tie this sheet
corner to corner, and carry it.

Your new work has a name too:
the one who seeks refuge
and is reviled.
But you clothe yourself in it
because you have no other.