Bleary and cross, emerging on to the Haymarket platform,
senses stirred reluctantly to life by the yeasty air,
resenting too-early mornings, as dark as the previous evenings coming home.
The most-broken promise to myself
to walk at lunchtime and find half an hour of light.
Nevertheless
My trudging steps learned to navigate the juttery paving,
found routes that were quicker in summer but nerve-testing in the drear.
Familiar pauses to frame just that angle of steeple against just that rising sun or waxing moon.
That corner building with the split-level garden flat, star of my Edinburgh-living fantasy.
The one where I walk to work, smiling.
Nevertheless
None of us pilgrims will ever afford to live here.
A city in thrall to the tourist, sacrificing housing security for short-term lets,
pavements barely navigable through sluggish crowds,
a transport system not-quite-collapsing as festivals and fringes of festival fringes
engorge it with passengers.
Nevertheless
The buzz. The constant, stupid, creative mass of August, the flyerers,
the overwhelming FOMO,
the literary adventures in what will be forever Charlotte Square,
the music, the boom, the fireworks,
the beacons of radical amid the seething commerce of it all.
Nevertheless
An aspic-ed history, made palatable for visitors
there more for the wizard that never lived than the ‘witches’ who died here.
Great men on plinths indicate skyward,
the streets below them built on blood-stained sugar and tobacco
and named for slave owners.
Nevertheless
My feet have tripped on less-told histories,
small girls who wrote stories and society ladies turned domestic terrorists.
Most cities' highest monuments are to war, yours is to words.
And the casual drama of that castle-topped volcano.
Nevertheless
When the world-changing virus put an end to the commute,
the barely-whispered relief.
Stumbling downstairs and straight into a meeting, work-attired from waist up.
A daily gin, because how else to mark the transition from workplace to home again?
Nevertheless
Crossing the Rail Bridge as the sun breaks,
the new bridge haloing and the elder, fading icon of industry past.
Look at that view (silently urging the carriage of snoozers and phone watchers)
it’s Edinburgh, showboating across the Forth.
And in a moment, all this could be swallowed by haar.