You can watch Kat Lyons’ brilliant new poem above from 0:12:56 on the event livestream.

Our City Poet performed it beautifully, ahead of my final major speech as mayor of my home city.

The Builders

Those who build houses
make something greater than the parts,
more than bricks and wires and glass. The footprint of a home
is a complicated sum where 1+1+1=
unquantifiable. Where to start. How to measure
the span of a roof that shelters a childhood,
the breadth of ambitions seeded by security,
the volume of lungfuls of long-held instability
exhaled
into community’s foundations.

Those who build communities
create an interlocking lacework, the pattern
finely woven in a mesh of give and take.
This is delicate work. It needs a close eye, careful hands
and patience. Threads unspool behind closed doors.
Tiny interactions stich a seam
through corridors and driveways,
shops and schools, bus-stops and libraries.
Neighbours knot their lives into tapestries of shared experience.
Connections flare like beacons in the night.

Those who build beacons
spark songs of warning, of celebration.
Voices bright as torches, proclaiming
we are here!
Those who become beacons,
stand storm-wreathed, tall as lighthouses;
place the lamp of their conviction on a windowsill
to guide our way. When mists close in
we find hope burning, a welcoming space
still open in the city’s heart.

Those who build cities,
tend them over years. The work is hard
the progress slow. There’s always more to do,
they learn to let it go. They pass their tools to other hands
to plant connections, seed new houses,
help communities expand. They watch
as life by life and brick by brick
the future city grows.
The builders change, the work goes on.
The beacons that they lit still burn.