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Sheena BlackhallPoemsElegy for a Dead Admiral, Possibly Nelson The Ghaists o ma Mither's Simmer Frocks |
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Legacies
Sheena Blackhall
Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything you see, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.
Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, ch 12 (quoting Oliver Cromwell)
O late, ma body's becam
a shrine fur warts, baith secular an religious.
Ma oxters are orchards o aik-aipples.
Legacies frae Cromwell's crop?
Mebbe they cam frae Flanders.
I hae the verra marra o a wart
frae the neb o a bodach peintit bi Bosch hissel.
Adrift in this Ship o Feels,
edgin nearer the rocks at ilkie shoogle,
I cudgel ma harns aboot this knobbily matter.
Should I zap them wi taed's bluid?
Clart them wi snail's bricht slivers?
Angels, I suspect,
hae hidden afflications,
corns aneth the wings,
carbuncles unner the goun.
Mebbe Lucifer, on his fiery plummet,
saw tae his horror ilkie scrat an scab
transmogrifee in the birsslin lowes o Hell,
bubble up broon like taed bree,
witch-prickers merks, set in his fated hide.
