Warp And Weft On The Canongate (Edinburgh) Poem by Sally Evans

The Canongate undulates,
famous street, historical to tourists,
who keep to the sharp incline,
Palace to Castle, Royal Mile.
 
The Canongate spreads,
Abbey Hill, Salisbury Crags,
older than Abbey or Palace,
or recent Parliament. Heights look down
 
on the Pleasance, bowl at the foot
of the great pull to the Castle,
processions' path of kings, queens, armies.
But look through the slats of bars.
                                     Each close
 
jostles its people still.
They wander in a different geography,
food stores to libraries to schools and pals,
hidden stairs, accessible gardens.
 
Storeyed flats rise to the backdrop:
hillside, cragside,
trees and skies.
An upward view.
 
On the Mile, like the warp,
investitures, institutions,
the Queen at service, Princesses married
carriages, Daimlers, police brass, pipe bands.
 
A feast cancelled. King James' first bride Magdalene of France, died,
lamented by Sir David Lyndsay, Herald,1537.
Festival of the Opening of the Scottish Parliament,2001
by effort of the Scottish people
 
spearheaded by Sir Sean Connery,
risen from an Edinburgh tenement
not far on foot from the top of the Mile,
linked in this tough urban fabric
 
for if the warp is the Royal Mile, the weft
is these marvellous closes
and the fabric is life, as my son and his wife
and their daughter move into this apartment
 
central city with scent of country,
hillside age-old and surviving
as we all survive: myself from London
to country, to city after city
 
and he, man from boy, first met
in a hospital no longer a hospital
a stone's throw behind this Abbey,
(in view of Salisbury Crags)
 
its distant windows
grown over by time
like this new balcony
(commanding Calton Hill)
 
on which grows clematis dead in winter,
sticks like barbed wire ready for rebirth.
History will be all their lives grown over
onto the warp and weft of the Canongate.
 
written for Chicago Calling festival 2012 and first performed there.