A Roman Dream

Written on Hadrian’s Wall

Hadrian’s Wall is only a short drive from where I live. It’s one of the great remnants of Roman Britain, stretching about seventy miles across the north of England, from the River Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west. The wall was begun almost two thousand years ago under the Emperor Hadrian, marking the northern edge of the Roman Empire.

It’s a great place to visit. It’s also a great place to just sit and dream of a different life. A life that existed long before our strange technological era.

Anyway

I wrote an outline of a poem during my last visit to the wall - Housesteads Roman Fort. That was last summer. Since then I’d forgotten about the poem. The other day while I was sorting through some of my notebooks, I was reunited with those scribbles. I’ve turned them into a poem. Here it is.

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A Roman Dream
Written on Hadrian’s Wall

My knees are too knobbly
for me 
to have been a Roman.
My head’s too screen-shaped
to have borne a galea.
My skin’s too thin to have worn
a skirt,
and I don’t speak a word of Latin. 

I’d not be good at pillaging
or plundering
and I’d miss home far too much.
But I’d have liked the wild grass,
the wandering seed, the soft rock
to sit on and the green kaleidoscope
of summer trees.

Violence is an odd thing
to push forward with, dragging
bodies along the wall, crossing rivers
of blood-coloured days, calling
for revenge instead of remembrance.

I’m too soft to be anything other
than a whisper. I’m too knitted, too 
man-made, 
to be anything other
than a stream of bits flowing back 
into the last legionnaires’ 
millennia-old dream.

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