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.
[...] Read more
poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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