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CALL FOR ARTISTS

Submitted by Editor on

Many thanks to reader Mark Saunders, who has sent us this upbeat vision of future developments. 

It was conceived, perhaps, through topaz-coloured spectacles. 

*****

Call for Artists

Come all ye artists!

The Golden Turd needs you!

you, who can glorify the work

on this blue January day

 

who can scale the concrete towers

more impregnable than the Castle

and the cranes towering taller still

like ancient siege equipment.

 

Describe how the well-clad workers

– Polish, Bosnian, Romanian –

descend from the cold heights

for black pudding and tattie scone,

 

how, as the Zuni cafe of San Francisco states:

immigrants make the country great.

 

Describe, artist, how this food for fuel

is served by Will in pristine chef whites

and his Grassmarket Project crew.

 

We need an artist who can express the soul

of the build, give voice to blank walls,

a voice that sings of a new icon, warmer and softer

than the glacial, sharp-edged London Shard,

newer than the fusty old New Town

which sits like a row of disapproving aunts.

 

We need a writer who can create fictions,

sending a detective to pace the spiral corridors

in sad, worn-out shoes,

or a painter of the constructivist mode

observing each nut and bolt, pin and rod

with the eye of an engineer.

 

Or a dancer who dances the form

as body marries architecture.

 

Or give it the brash Bollywood treatment,

a steamy tale of forbidden love

set against the shimmering gold.

 

Most importantly,

we need an artist who can

envision the future:

a city criss-crossed by electric bullet trains

palm trees lining Princes St,

the ruins of the New Town

cleared away for owl-filled park land.

 

The Castle and Hollyrood Palace turned hostel

to house climate change refugees.

The Turd, white with age, now

dubbed the Taj Mahal of the north,

its proud reflection in a lake

where once John Lewis stood.