Bewick Walks To Scotland Sequence (D) Glasgow Poem by Sally Evans

Met up in Glasgow's urban commonroom
with more from the apprentice network,
Geordie and Scots intelligible one to the other,
and Glasgow, like a larger Sunderland,
creeping round its nursling river -
less of a horse-pond than the Wear or Tyne.
Here come ribaldry and rhyme,
beerslopping through the door of the hostelry,
Sauchiehall Street pie jokes, rural horrors,
the debunking of modest lasses. But my art
is my mistress, much more demanding
in that I have not satisfied her yet.
I watch her, every whim and curio.
When I become an impresario,
old master of art whom the world may forget,
remember, or pigeonhole (it matters not)
she will still be my mistress, though I hide
her like a dowager in imagined pride.