I fill my bag with fruit and wander on,
window-shopping, my eye caught by the fabric shops
that burst with rolls and bolts of lace, and lamé
metallic and dangerous as deep water,
with satin, crepe and polyester
crusted with sequins, bullion and tiny mirrors,
foil stamped, hologrammed and photo-printed,
fabric patterned in every possible way;
striped and checked, hazy with impossible flowers,
stark with calligraphic motifs repeating and repeating
unknown phrases in an unknown tongue.

Brilliant as some dead caliph’s treasure
the windows blaze with textile gems;
sapphire and emerald; ruby, heavy turquoise
and white that glimmers with the blue sheen of
Chomolungma’s distant snows.
One window is all pinks; from summer’s dusky rose
through bubblegum, Shocking to a
shell pink so faint it’s hardly breathing.
And best of all, so beautiful it makes me sigh,
a half unrolled length of pure, gleaming
silk that fades from blood red to the pink
of a desert sunset and back again.

But I walk on, down into the valley and the
secret stone puzzle that’s the City.
Above me far overhead, wind-driven clouds unfurl
like great tattered banners, whipping through the blue
like flying prayers; they twist and roil like a time-lapse film,
cinematic, impossible and always with us in
this place so dominated by vast, untameable skies.

Stark against the huge backdrop of the clouds stand
the monumental sandstone buildings,
the Wool Barons' proud and unflinching legacy,
palaces of trade that couldn’t be built now,
will never be built again by modern hands
no longer trained to patience and the skills
that turned the primeval bones of earth into carvings
as dense and intricate as nature herself.

Glancing up I see faces, plants and creatures made from stone
decorating every cornice, edge and buttress;
petrified sailing ships in full rig and portraits of
adamantine queens in medallions set on the
slab-sides of crumbling, forgotten towers.
Camels stride past pyramids cut out of stone by
men who would never see such things for themselves.
In the hundred niches that pock the great cliff of city hall
blind saints and craggy kings gaze into nothing
bound by masonry ropes and sandstone swags of ivy.
On other walls, griffins perch on acanthus twists
and arabesques, curlicues and cutwork
so deep you can stick your fingers in it
foam, twine and snake up spires that
reach greedily for the golden light that daily
turns their crushed crystals to living amber
for a few brief moments of glory . . .

I go to the Wool Exchange, that Temple to
the trade that made the city famous;
high up under the canopy of its arching,
ribbed roof that vaults to a ridge
like a mediaeval galleon upturned,
and beached on a city street,
painted wooden archangels crowned in antique gold pray
with knotted, steepled hands.
Once they were mute witnesses to the swirl and play of money
on the trading floor beneath them,
now the city seraphim watch ordinary people
buying books and drinking coffee;
but they don’t mind - they stretch their stiff, gilded wings
over everyone, young and old, and we’re all in their charge.

And I sit down for a minute, amongst the books
and think of the town, stretching out and away
from here; dark and bright, beautiful and ugly,
the high-sided wind-scoured canyons of the deserted mills
telling their silent stories of what has been and what will be;
the deaths, the births, the fighting and the love,
all the humanity of it, gathered from every place in the world,
and all of us, everything, under the infinite night-sky now,
a silver twist of crescent moon fragile as a girl’s first earring
visible even over the streetlights sodium glare,
and I think - this is where we live, in this stone maze,
in this northern city, under the terrible stars, and we belong.

[(c) Joolz Denby, 2002]