Elevated Discovery

A Discovery

The photograph you see here was taken on the afternoon of the second day of my first visit to Poland—a moment that has stayed with me far longer than I ever expected. I captured it with my trusty iPhone 3G, though the device felt almost insignificant compared to the weight of the experience unfolding around me. I was travelling with two dear friends who had invited me into their world and welcomed me into their homes with a generosity so profound I still feel it today.

They were bound to this region—its cities, its stories, its striking landmarks—with a depth of connection I could sense but not yet fully grasp. Katowice wasn’t quiet or unassuming; it was vivid, surprising, and unlike any European city I had visited before. Structures like Spodek rose from the landscape with an almost otherworldly confidence, and the city carried a pulse that was impossible to ignore.

As we wandered through the city’s streets, the air thick with history and the hum of everyday life, they suggested—almost mischievously—that we take a ride on one of the lifts clinging to the outside of a store called SKARBEK. It was a small idea, offered just for fun, but in that moment it felt like an invitation into the city’s hidden rhythms, a glimpse of the world they knew so well and were now letting me step into.

Back then, Katowice felt like a city mid-stride—part industrial past, part emerging future. You could still see the outlines of the old Silesian identity everywhere: the brickwork, the tramlines, the pit-head silhouettes on the horizon. But alongside them, new buildings were rising, their glass and steel catching the light in ways that didn’t quite match the older streets yet. It was a place shifting shape, but not hurriedly: a city learning how to be something more than what it had been, without forgetting what it was.

I expected a fun day out with friends and imagined Katowice as simply another large city, no different from many I’d visited in the UK or elsewhere. But something shifted. What I found there wasn’t just a city; it was a moment of recognition—the sense that something important had happened here long before I arrived.

This poem isn’t about that day exactly.

It’s about an uncovering of place and self.

Katowice 2008 — A Discovery

Some cities overwhelm you with beauty.
Katowice overwhelmed me with texture.

We stepped off the train
into a cold that felt older than winter—
a dry, metallic, mechanical edge
that caught in the breath
and settled on the skin
beneath a sky bright with a hard winter light
that made every surface sharper.

The station rose around us
in concrete vaults and shadowed curves,
a relic of a future someone once imagined.

We moved through it carefully,
travellers threading a way through damp stone floors,
entering a city
that seemed to exist in layers
I couldn’t see all at once.

Outside, the air carried its own history —
coal-warmth drifting from old kamienice,
diesel threading through the cold,
a faint industrial undertone
that felt like the city’s pulse.

Later, rising through glass,
the streets unfolded beneath us —
facades patched and peeling,
neon unlit against the day,
trams threading narrow rails,
queues bending toward old stops,
and I fell quiet.

Trams clank-clattered through the centre,
singing their song of squealing clackity-clacks,
pantographs brushing the wires, humming overhead
like a hissing, crackling electrical message
sent across the winter air.

People moved with purpose,
caught in currents of a city
still running on older rhythms.

Fruit and vegetable stalls glowed under the pale sky,
oranges burning bright against winter grey,
buckets of bright flowers startling the cold.

I owned a history of crossed borders,
yet nothing prepared me for this —
a place that felt half-real,
half-remembered from some Cold War dream,
a city arriving all at once
in sound and scent and astonishment.

I was tired from travelling,
yet something in the air—
coal-warm, diesel-bright,
alive —
pulled me upright.

I hadn’t expected to feel anything.
Instead, I felt everything —
the weight, the cold, the pulse,
the unmistakable texture
of a city revealing itself
all at once.