At King's College Chapel, Cambridge

A Negress with a knotted, tasselled scarf, Power-shouldered jacket, buckskin moccasins Cromwellian warts on cheek and nose and chin Fingers the ancient carvings, clucks in awe A girl with matted hair, grown long and blonde Like Boudicca with nits, looks nonchalant Faced with a raging dragon and a hound A skull-faced skulker wearing a baseball cap His wrists tattooed with devils and swastikas Looks dumb-struck at the chapel's soaring roof In fourteen forty one, the sainted King Henry the Sixth, laid down the founding stone Great walls of buff and cream grew up and up To vaults like fans of Spanish filigree The dark oak screen with gilded organ pipes Gifted by Henry eighth and Anne Boleyn Workmen in overalls chatter on cell phones Move ladders here and there, tape up seat rows A girl with thunder-thighs bangs on a pew Chews gum and sulks beneath a teacher's glower Rubens' Adoration of the Magi Becomes the backdropp of the tourist snaps Rupert Brooke's name, cut into the stone Reveal he died in war, lost generation On Easter Sunday, TV cameras rolled No ladder, workmen, tourist queues in view Only the candlelight's kind, smudging glow The mystery of naked flame in darkness As holy as the voices of small boys Soaring up from their throats like linnets' prayers