Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Writing * Poetry * Dark Fiction * Weird * Fantastic * Horror * Fantasy * Science Fiction * Literature

New poem

Mackintoshes

I’m writing this to tell my baby daughter
– who took my pen to chew just now – about her
rambunctious forebears, Papists or Dissenters,
before they were Glasgow artists or inventors:
nine hundred years of sanguinary glories,
blood-fuelled vendettas, feuding feudatories,
feral mosstroopers, breekless in the heather,
sleeping out plaid-wrapped through all Highland weather;
conveniently detained during Flodden,
second at Bannockburn, first at Culloden;
Jacobite malcontents, staunch in lost causes,
schooled by reverses and misfortune’s tawses;
clan wildcat totem for crest and supporters,
red lion, boar’s head, heart in hand, ship quarters;
proud bearings passed through gentleman and peasant,
from those ancestral mountains to the present
ludicrous days of raincoats and galoshes:
ferocious, feckless, fearless Mackintoshes.