Rivers of Switzerland
My geography teachers are dead:
their mountains, forests, oxbow lakes,
the small hands that could squeeze
the life out of anything.
Even the student with the boots
she said were crocodile
is terminal moraine now, like my books,
like all I ever knew of calico.
Only the rivers of Switzerland remain:
tucked discreetly under bridges
in Geneva, racing white-flecked
beside the Rhaetia Bahn:
the Rhine, the Rhône, the Inn, the Aar,
the Ticino: and those whose names
only the locals know, their sources
lost in the heart of boulder fields,
seeping into meadows where the cows
still wear bells; or just round the corner,
flowing from the mouth of Bacchus
behind a gate marked ‘Private’.
Duncan Chambers is a University researcher living in York and working in Sheffield. He has been writing poetry since the 1980s and has been published in various magazines including Ambit, The Rialto, Stand, The Interpreter’s House and The North. He was shortlisted in the 2016/17 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition.