The Wall

Your birthday week we walked the Roman wall

five sunny days

backpacking, east to west, the call

of the ancients and their secretive ways

 

beckoned us to join them, as if

history might offer a gentle forewarning. We brushed against lichenous stone

   photographed imposing shapes of quiff-

topped thistle, their seedlings chucked by angry boys who ran the Vallum

   with catapults, clubs, and sharpened bone.

 

At least, that was our theory. The oppressed

had tried to mark the land

with flowering symbols of resistance. You took cuttings, pressed

them in the journal of your trip. I watched your once-steady hand

 

lay each gaudy stem: bog rosemary, chive, asphrodel

notation written as I stood there

admiring the undulating hills that bore the wall, magnificent, as though a spell

had once been cast upon treasured land that sang a mysterious air.

 

Or had perhaps a covenant once been laid

on bog, mile castle, sandbank, scree,

those sacrificed in its making hidden beneath history's heavy shade

patiently awaiting you and me.

 

At night we ate with other walkers - German, Swiss, one

from Montreal, a woman like you

on a pilgrimage of sorts, done

with modernity, the rat-race, a marriage of many years, time

   honoured, blessed with an off-beat point of view.

 

We toasted good health and good fortune - the songs and booze

a diversionary balm. Beneath canvass we confirmed our future fears,

re-affirmed late-flowering love, a secret vow for us to choose.

You cried and helpless I tried to stem your tears.

 

At dawn we marched: across sunlit fields, over brittle gates and hives

left Kit Kat offerings for walkers to find

recited other walls that had shaped our mis-matched lives

Berlin, Israel, China – the self-imposed walls we brutally erect in

   each other’s mind.

 

The end was sudden, as you expected; exhausting, life earned,

life passed by – life lived as it was meant to be -

the wall a memorial to which I returned,

placed a Roman offering – myrtle - in your and others’

   memory.