Bridge lift

Bridge lift

by Cecilia Knapp

Close your eyes
and picture a bridge.
Isn’t this the one you see?
Two stone towers
needling our changeable sky,
those glinting buttered turrets
and the pale Glasgow steel
that runs between them.

And of course the road,
that portal across water
for forty thousand
daily pairs of feet.

Perhaps a woman in a van
crammed with boxes
is driving into a new life.
Pulled, like a current,
south of the river
away from a bad old love.

Or a family, quartet of sensible
anoraks, hair made sudden in the wind,
is laughing in a language you can’t
understand, holding their bodies
still for the camera,
as so many have before, and will,
as you’d like to one day.

There’s the waiter, late
to an ill paid shift,
an untucked shirt,
and a whole life
waiting to be lived.

And look, there’s you,
amongst it all,
standing in the cool shadow
of so much history, on a bridge
that’s stood much longer
than your life,
built in the old ways,
relic of an old world
as the new unspools
around you.

And yes, there is still
so much that we should
hope for.

For now though,
the 78 sighs its gentle glide,
full with yellow light.
It slows to a stop before
the bridge splits
at its very centre.

And just for a moment
watching what was once
a flat tarmac road
now vertical in front of you,
reaching up, like arms do in bliss,
the world is tilted on its axis,
skewed and upended
and anything is possible.
Then you adjust
(as humans do)
remember you are here
and glance below
to see a tall ship passing through
and how you cannot help but wave
at the passengers on the deck
like the true kid you are
under all the grit of living.