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.