The Night Climbers of Cambridge
When all are gone, except the cats,
and the occasional, homecoming drunk,
and the world goes chrome-yellow in the tinted light –
better in the old days when the town was dead black –
they creep from vault to chimney stack,
with their climbing-tackle.
The college clocks chime quarter-hours
in tune as they ascend with care,
foot over foot on the frosty gleaming slates,
spires spread out like wedding cake,
crusted icing, hard to break.
Up here, it’s so graceful.
The Alps are heroic but this is perverse;
if caught, they’ll be punished.
Night-time creatures, like graffiti
artists with their pots of paint;
just as well their mothers don’t
know what they are up to.
Legends stalk these spiky fields
of moonlit medieval stone;
characters like the mad Dean
who climbed his chapel long ago
gave a bloodcurdling scream and then jumped down,
and the unknown hero
who risked his neck to string between
two pinnacles, a banner,
which when he’d got away unseen
flew proudly over Cambridge.
PEACE IN VIETNAM, it said. They couldn’t
bring it down for ages.
Mad, of course. The glassy saints
who hug their bloodied shirts all night
and men of stone who never sleep
were less intense and driven.
Cats yowl. The drunk, if he looked up,
would swear that he was dreaming.
Page(s) 10
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- Lamport Court
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- Obsessed with pipework
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
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- Poetry London (1951)
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Smoke
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The