Three words, three sharp beats: "Spooky. Moody. Gorgeous." Luca Flauto opens his Edinburgh poem the way you might introduce a friend with a complicated personality, and that comparison unlocks everything that follows. The city is addressed as "you" from the start and given a "coat of leaves," a "halo," even moods. The poem is less about sights than about loving a place that refuses to be one thing: bright and dark, cosy and haunted, welcoming and a little forbidding.
That double nature is stated most directly in the second stanza, where the stones of the Royal Mile "reflect your brightness / and your darkness." Wet stone is a well-chosen image, since it literally throws back both light and shadow. The pairing of "brightness" and "darkness" also gives the poem one of its few deliberate sound echoes, the shared "-ness" binding the opposites together. Then comes a flicker of humour. The "memory of old witches / haunts the sceptics," who "run towards a fireplace" for comfort "in a cup of Earl Grey / or a stroke." The gothic past is strong enough to send doubters scurrying, yet the remedy is cheerfully ordinary. The final "or a stroke" is the strangest moment. The poem doesn't say whether it means a caress or a brushstroke, but the second reading quietly anticipates the "painting" that appears a few stanzas later.
There is no rhyme scheme here. This is free verse, with stanzas ranging from two lines to nine, and short lines that spill over into one another ("who run towards a fireplace, / trying to find comfort"). The effect is of thoughts arriving as the speaker walks. The opening is the most controlled passage, because "Spooky," "Moody" and "Gorgeous" each fall on a strong first beat, like three footsteps. After that the rhythm loosens into speech. Even the grammar relaxes: "Love you when the sun is up" drops the "I," as if the feeling were too familiar to need announcing.
What the speaker really loves emerges in the small turns. He loves the city in sunshine "but" dreams of it in rain, so the wet streets are the true object of desire. When "northern winds blow cold flows / on those dusty roofs," the advice is not to shelter but to wave back, treating the weather as a neighbour to greet. The same attitude runs through "for those who have enough / courage to spend." Courage becomes a currency, and the reward for paying it is a "painting" of four seasons "revealing its shape, its colours." The city does not hand over its beauty for free. It is for those who stay out in it.
The speaker is also a giver. The city's halo makes every corner "special as a gift / I grant to a loved one," so love is shown as something he gives to the place as well as receives from it. In the sixth stanza he walks with "a wild bouquet," "dancing under the rain, / writing in my mind the next poem." The rain from the first stanza returns, and now he is dancing in it. The poem briefly becomes aware of itself, a poem about the moment of imagining a poem.
The later stanzas shift in tone. The Castle "looking after the people, / and the Royals who live in it" is warmer and more postcard-like than the earlier, sharper images. Then the senses move from sight to sound: festivals "echo in my ears," there is "chirping," and "the voice of the forest is calling." The ending hedges twice: "maybe it's a goodbye, / a happy ending, maybe." The repeated "maybe" refuses to settle, as the city itself never settles on one mood.
The poem's significance is modest but real. It shows how personification can turn a tourist's subject into a relationship, and how real affection includes the shadows. The numeral in the title suggests, though the text alone cannot confirm it, that this is one entry in a longer sequence. Read alone, it still works as a love letter that likes its beloved best when it is wet, moody and a little haunted.