Did you imagine bidin 
on the wind-blown Broomielaw,
those gull-shredded chip boxes and
jakies chugging Buckfast?

Half-clad lassies tottering
home after bevvy-nights
are flummoxed as to whose skirt hems
they sweep— that wuman;
arms raised in defiance, feet
planted firmly in Glasgow —
but they know you belong.

Staring out to Red Clydeside
can you hear the ghost
of rent strikers’ courage
marching on St Enoch’s;
women with all to lose?
Feel the hush of the shipyard’s 
down-tools, rust now flaking
off the Finnieston Crane.

Revellers ejected early
from the Riverboat Casino forget
those battles but remember bombers
once blitzed their granny’s hoose, though. 
And someone’s Great Auntie Agnes
died fighting fascists in Spain.

Moira McPartlin is the author of five novels; her latest, Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag (Trilleachan Press, 2021), is written in Fife dialect. Moira’s current project, A Thing So Delicate, is about Scotland’s Victorian mass concrete viaducts.