Running in the City of Spires - Oxford Half Marathon 2023

A little poetry jotting whilst sat at mile 10 waiting for my friend, Dino, to run by.

The steps of Sunday's spirited sojourners 

Drum defiantly 

Under Oxford's sleeping spires -

A place where academia never tires.

Students wake to whispers of a morning half marathon -

Casting aside remnants of a night now gone,

Whilst transforming into St Anne's antiquated swan;

Gliding slowly down the Isis to St Giles,

Cheering those running miles

For charity,

On a dawning

Morning

Of majesty.

Bells ring out for Restore,

And the choir cries out in comradery against cancer.

Money raised to find an answer.

MacMillan marches through Marston,

Whilst Aged UK adorns the sun-kissed streets of Abingdon.

People with painful lives, 

Who've buried grief within dust-coated archives,

Skip in solidarity with those past and present,

To celebrate and lament

Our excruciatingly ephemeral existence.

Living is our beautiful resistance. 

Brilliant minds,

Encased within the Bodleian Library,

Echo through Oxford's ancestral passages,

Trapped in the liminal spaces of literature;

This city's soul and voice.

Oxford is a place,

Where revelers have the choice

To rejoyce

And read James Joyce.

15 October 2023