L’hommelette

Rob McClure

Breathtaking, isn’t it? You’d never know

the lemony luminescence of Indian yellow

stipulated a Gwala force-fed a stick-thin cow

with mango leaves (its sole sustenance) till

desiccated urine got collected in terracotta pots,

clarified as syrup & dried into pigmented clumps,

for what but piss leeched from a dying animal

could make the spiraling yellow stars

of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence look that alive?

And look here! A Mexican Red smear

vivid as a brushstroke of Titian or Tintoretto,

carmine extracted from cochineal of course

requiring the insects’ systematic crushing,

Cortés’s conquistadors first to be offered

carmine cloth (in Tenochtitlan was it?),

myriad histories of color embedded too

in the crush splurge of a stunning sfumato,

as in this wee dab of Tyrian purple distilled

from the murex’s mucous gland

(located under the mollusc’s rectum),

how many thousands of hypobranchial glands

of the sea-snail empurple one inch of canvas!

(though manufacture I’m assured—given stench

of faecal excretions—was a tad unpleasant)

but look, when all’s said and done

that’s just art for you.

ROB McCLURE’S poetry has appeared in Irish Pages, Subtropics, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Birmingham, Anthropocene, Flyway and Orbis. He won the McCash Poetry Competition in 2025. He is the author of The Scotsman (Black Spring Press, 2024).