BETH MCDONOUGH

How to disarm your Baptist in Siena

Possess his right arm, complete with hand –
scarcely-fleshed, take a mostly skeletal version.
Research suggests that could exist in Chinsurah
or Montenegro perhaps, whilst for many
his severed index finger still rests
somewhere palatial in Istanbul.
But, for your purposes, we'll consider it here,
in this liquoriced Duomo, silver-cased.

Commission some sculptor, advanced in his prime,
scrooge the odd ducat, pull a fast one on funds.

When Donatello's bronze work arrives,
find the great saint lacks a left arm.

Later arrangements, and presumably payment,
fix a prosthetic to gesture at all.
Though no-one's quite certain who actually cast it,
your Holy Man's fully-limbed now.

Give the gaunt prophet his niche. Let him call
across hordes who follow rolled-up stabby umbrellas.
Trap his ravaged patina inside walled stories,
floor them in marble, snaked over by more

of those seeking two most inadequate toilets.
In the loud search for that Guide near the door, now
you've disarmed him. Prayers escape into crowds.

John the Baptist still cries out for a wilderness.

Sounding out the Firth

Firth – that word, understood ahead

of any estuary suggested. Firths to fret

land, firths on maps, violet-inked firths

once rolled out in jotters, pencil-identified,

Now, this Firth of Tay; forward floods
with fff, to douse sung shingle's upturned boats.
A fff which fizzes small waves, rushes up

percussioning pebbles. Fff, storms in forte.

Fff shifts into its low-lying vowel,
grinds r to find an ebbing th's answered end

of each oscillation. Th, in the shape of this
great place, is never quite river or ocean.

Sifting the push and pull of long river news
stirs with the North Sea's mass, Fir
asks something of Fife, laps sand

at Kinshaldy, and offers up something

to the last of Tentsmuir's upstanding pines.

This Firth, no longer imprisoned by bridges.
Firth, where all waters bow out for Norway.

Firth, now sounding its dancing anatomy,

is that haul, wild between tides,
rocking between fff and th, which growls

deep in its girth, its dancing anatomy and it won't be defined by

estuary.

Beth McDonough is a Dundee-based poet and artist. Her pamphlet Lamping for Pickled Fish is published by 4Word. Her shared poetry collection with Nikki Robson, and a hybrid project on outdoor swimming will be published in 2026. She co-hosts Platform Sessions in Fife.

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