Londinium (English)

Londinium by Anthony Fisher Voice Portrait by Giovanna Iorio

Put your ear to the ground –

hear the shouts of rotten flesh,

the clash of smith and wheel wright,

twist and stretch of the rope maker.

Your eyes will sting with the scent

of wood smoke, run with the bite

of ammonia from foetid urine.

Long below all this runs

the mark of Boudicca’s revenge

in the thin, red slice of burnt iron;

splitting a line of ash and clay

layered in the stones and tiles,

wood, old fires and bones.

Now squeezed by North and South

within its mud-soft lined canal;

the river once nurtured Neanderthal,

Homo Sapiens; lonely itinerants

drifting by for half a million years.

The first hut 15,000 years ago,

now a city of a myriad tongues

that adopts all who come –

hunter, farmer, the dispossessed.

© Anthony Fisher, February 2011