Mach1

A Poem For Mach1

BY RACHEL PLUMMER

As soon as I saw the opportunity for a poet to write about the new ‘Mach1’ building, I was excited. I love to write about interesting and unusual buildings, and the picture of the proposed ‘Mach1’ project was absolutely fascinating to me. Sculptural, unique, like nothing I’d ever seen before. I knew I had to apply.

When I was told that I’d been chosen for the project I was over the moon. Getting to meet with the architects, artists and others behind ‘Mach1’ and then to turn the insights they gave me into poetry has been inspiring and challenging, and I’ve relished it.

It means such a lot for emerging artists like myself to be given these sorts of opportunities. This is how we push ourselves in new directions, how we learn and grow as artists. I’m grateful to Parabola for this experience, which has influenced my writing in ways that will resonate through my work for a long while to come.

Endlessly building and unbuilding itself, the guardian of the city rises from the land to stand half-stooped, like a man on one knee peering at his own reflection in a window’s sunlit eye.

How beautiful he is, about to ask the sky to marry him.

And on such a day as this, when light has swept clean all the corners and left the flowerbeds freshly made.

You must remember there are no wrong angles. There is only the echo, its tidal back and forth pooling in corners, your own voice mirrored, your self unbuilt, unmade, unmarried.

Come closer.

Come through the garden of steel poppies reclaiming the ground in the name of our wild city, raising the flags of themselves high above the wind to where the guardian keeps watch over all the sunwashed horizon, the sky blushing under her cirrus veil.

You know this place. You know it like air knows the taste of thunder.

This is where brick-boned buildings grow as tall as willowherb, and beckon you inside.

Where red meets borrowed blue and you will make yourself a living space, a place that breathes and grows and knows the only way to rise up is to fall and then to build.