'Yir a wee puke'
That's whit ma Granny
used to say tae me.
'Yir a wee puke'
And, ah think whit she meant was,
ah was a wee bit soft in the heed,
a wee bit sensitive and dependent,
a mammies boy like, daft wae it tae.
'Yir mammy and daddy,
see only the Angel's Halo
above your heed, Boy.'
She didn't mean it nasty.
Maybe she was a bit jealous.
Bit she meant it in a way
that was just a wee observation.
'That boy, he's as saft
as a Caramel Sundae.'
Ma gran used to make
pancakes every Saturday.
A large tray of them.
And ah wid watch her make
the mix up, wae eggs
and flour and sugar.
She'd spoon some mix oot
pouring it ontae the hot pan,
in a wee circle it wid form,
and it wid cook.
Then she wid flip it over
and it would be golden broon.
And she'd make about thirty
pancakes, fir the whole family
to eat wae thur tea and coffee.
And ah wid just stand beside her,
and watch the pancakes being made.
And ah wid smell them like a wee prayer.
The sweet baked smell clung tae my nostrils.
And ah loved that,
watching her make the pancakes,
wee circular pancakes,
wee, saft halos
that we all ate.
1 comment:
I enjoyed this a lot. I enjoyed the look the pancakes too. You should see the sad pair that's sitting on top of our fridge at the moment - sad, very sad looking.
It's a hard call to decide exactly how Scottish to make a piece. I wrote a poem recently that really only works when you read the overblown translation, the kind of thing Stanley Baxter did so well.
I'm assuming this is fiction. Either way it's got character and worth polishing. I don't see it as poetry per se but as a piece of flash fiction it's brill.
A few thoughts:
I'm not sure about the capital D on 'Dependant' - is that a typo?
In one place you have 'wiz' and in another 'was'.
Glaswegians tend to drop the d in 'and' - you could get away with 'an'.
'Angels' is possessive - it should be 'Angel's'.
What about 'jist' instead of 'just'?
'A large big' is too much - 'great big' or just 'big' would do nicely.
Some of your sentences don't begin with capitals and your personal pronouns are inconsistent, sometime 'I' and sometimes 'i'. You need to fix that. Did you think about using 'Ah' instead?
You use 'heed' instead of 'head' but not 'broon' instead of 'brown'.
I'm not keen on 'biscuit halos' - they're not - how about 'wee, saft' instead?
You use 'would' and yet you use 'Yir' and 'whit' - wouldn't 'wid' be better?
I would've e-mailed my notes to you but there's no e-mail address on your site so I hope you'll forgive me putting my observations up for the world to see.
Once you've got this sorted try Ranfurly Review. They published a couple of my short stories and I've a poem in their December issue.
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