Bridge: Golden Jubilee
Title: Golden Jubilee Bridges
Writer: Carmen Lavin
Creative partner: Melanie Smith
The work: Multiple exposure photography with visual typography on two hanging scrolls of Offenbach paper, each A3, in magnetic hangers, echoing the structure of the double bridge.
Description: Images of rising guy-ropes in towering knots of light. Words evoke sounds of voices, steps and music, from dawn to nightfall, while the changing sky laps over waves below.
GOLDEN JUBILEE BRIDGES
Carmen Lavin
Giant origami birds of steel fly high
while gulls swoop far below
and in the melting morning mist
giddy filigree dawn light unwraps a line of masts
saluting regally.
Stretching out a hand I grasp one of
the taut slender masts and
feel the pulses tingling through me
in cascades of energies.
Tiens, tu vois? Einmalig! Che bel panorama!
How many languages cross the bridge today?
Voices from around the earth
and jazz, laments of kilted pipers
echo
both sides of the
humming rails and rocking rhythms
of commuter trains
In vital ebb and flow.
Five o’clock chimes from Big Ben
come ripping through the breeze.
I can smell a new tang in the air.
Chiselled shadows fall down from the spars,
long ladders through the steps of disappearing
crowds and entertainers picking up day’s earnings.
Downstream over St Paul’s
twilight rays are bouncing from the Shard’s glass onto the Sky Garden
and on the other side of jangling rail tracks
upstream Westminster quivers towards me
as I stand here on the walkway
enveloped in carmine, vermilion,
cobalt blue reflections
while close by the great Eye goes on circling,
watching
every blazing beacon above me,
throwing white showers of starbursts into the night
like a jewelled crown.