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Forth Bridge & The Cantilever
A ‘special mention’ from the Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ ekphrastic challenge.
Forth Bridge & The Cantilever
The genius of the cantilever
means you don’t need falsework
and can build over space.
The genius of the cantilever means you don’t need falsework
and can build over space.
The engineers stood at the tidal firth
to calculate the tracery into existence,
metal spillikins that will triangulate
for years, through storms, carrying freight
rumbling, heavy weighted, iron-shod wheels,
carrying Forth trains across the wide span.
They had to know it would work. Not guess.
A solid structure that started as an idea,
something purely mental, growing inside
the minds of these two Victorian engineers,
that had never been achieved at scale
before — the sheer heft of imagination
First published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press
where steel means hope, future, pride;
where utility and beauty engage force
to create an enduring flight over water.
