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The Godwake

He stretched himself slowly
And rubbed at his eyes,
Rolled over and got to his feet,
His breastplate was rusty, the straps and the eyes
Had mouldered while he was asleep,
And on the horizon, though barely awake
The sun struggled over the hill,
It gleamed on the droplets of dew on the grass
As the figure stood listening and still.

His eyes, they looked puzzled
His visage was grim,
He looked for the pillars of home,
And where were the votaries praying to him,
The Standards, the Legions of Rome?
And where were the barracks, the stables, the mess,
The clash of the soldiers within?
The silence of centuries caught at his ears
And the meadows lay, fallow and green.

He looked for the portals that
Over the hill,
Had stood for Minerva, his bride,
The altar, mosaics, the statue of him,
The flowers from the countryside.
The sentries that stood at attention all day
Protecting his bride at her bath,
The fountain that gushed by the altar inside,
The meandering hillside path.

He came upon hedgerows
And thickets and trees,
The landscape had altered its creed,
No sign of his goddess, the altar, the bees
That had buzzed in the glade for their mead.
He stood for a moment, a tear at his eye,
Then roared in some Latin, and groaned,
As lightning forked down at the primitive sound
That had brought every province to Rome.

A man wandered out from
A thicket down there,
A hedger who wielded his shears,
He shrunk at the lightning and pulled off his cap,
Heard Latin, and covered his ears,
The country ran deep in the old fellow's veins,
From Angle and Saxon and Celt,
Before his beloved Britannia had been
Like a slave on a Roman's belt.

The God stood a terrible
Thirty hands high,
The old man had judged, by his horse,
His helmet, though rusty, had brown-ringed the sky,
His eye had set fire to the gorse,
He looked at the old man, who fell to his knees,
And sensed there was something amiss,
He bid him arise, and he looked in his eyes
And he pointedly stared at the shears.

The hedger was cunning,
He opened his shears,
And pointed the blades at the God,
'These shears are magic, I bid you beware!
They act like a lightning rod.
These shears have cut down the Legions of Rome,
They've banished them all from our shores,
Have toppled your chapels and scattered their gods,
So none of this country is yours! '

The God turned and staggered
Way over the hill,
And down to a ribboning road,
The enemy's chariot came at him, until
He could see where the charioteer rode,
He drew out his mighty and rusty old sword,
Swung once, 'til it ran him right down,
And Mithras was shattered and battered to dust
On the outskirts of Caerleon Town!

The hedger laid Rosemary,
Parsley and Thyme
At the place where her altar had been,
He'd known in his bones that it lay in his fields
For Minerva was locked in his genes,
While a Mack eighteen-wheeler lay dead by the road
With a slash that had sliced it apart,
And a gibbering driver was heard to exclaim:
'I'm done with those purple hearts! '

19 November 2009

poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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