Video Displays
I’m wandering across a dark blue bowl
or through the red weave of a tapestry
video screens – illuminated walls –
have turned into a world that welcomes me.
Designed to meet the needs of tapestry,
whose reasonable adjustment is the dark,
museums are mindful of mosaics, not me.
I’ve learnt to expect neglectful spaces,
where high-up notices hide in the dark.
Don’t touch. You’re less important than this vase.
But, since the museum imagined me,
I have the freedom of these spaces.
Not being precious about surfaces
If they will hold me up, I menace bowls.
I frighten staff who can’t imagine me.
I can’t leave touch outside. How do I praise
these dark blue bowls for making sudden sense
transfigured by illuminated walls
after a lifetime of neglectful spaces?
This poem was commissioned by the Burrell Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland
A Seizure on the Maternity Ward
Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff
that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired?
And should I yell or let it wander off,
my crisis just a detail on the ward
that nobody will log, unless I call?
My world is that unearthly form of sick,
but it is ebbing now. A lifelong flaw
in my dishevelled brain. A minifit.
Last time, I let them know, believed I should,
spent five hours in obstetric A&E.
Five minutes in, I wished I had a book.
Since what they know about the nyaff’s unclear,
is this the right decision: let it pass,
and risk us on an educated guess?
NUALA WATT lives and works in Glasgow. Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Stairs and Whispers: D/Deaf and Disabled Writers Write Back (Nine Arches Press 2017) and A Year of Scottish Poems (Pan Macmillan 2018). Poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Words and Music. ‘Important Information Enclosed’ appears in the Poetry Archive’s Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2023 collection. Work is forthcoming in Versus Versus 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe Books 2025). 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 and shortlisted for Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award.
Read more by Nuala Watt
Poem at the Poetry Archive
Poems in Word Gathering
Video at BBC Scotland (via YouTube)