Poem 250

Another version of what you don’t know (or refuse to know) starting to hurt you … the way Romans or Roman Britons viewed seemingly insane Picts bears similarities to how the suicide bombers of our era unhinged our sense of rationality and security … work on your walls as you may, the barbarians are always at the gate …

( furthermost is a great word … )

The Wall

Hadrian built a wall
and said

this is where the world ends

that wall has been hard to hold
but it has been held
no family has not suffered
has not volunteered and lost
a son

we know nothing now but the wall
its bricks and ditches
stretching beyond distance
from firth to firth they say
the towers and guardhouses are the furthermost
reach and sticking point
of empire the fingernails
of the capital

here is the end of the world

there is treason danger
in talk of men with clotted hair
blue men
who throw themselves shrieking into the ditches
of thorns and stakes
so that their brothers can pass over them
and scale the face
when my son came on leave
I would ask him nothing
of what he had seen
no explanation for the arrows
that rattled through his friends

now he does not come
and clouds rise up from the north
over the edge of the world

still I say there is nothing
beyond the wall