The Invaders

A Poem by David Lewis Paget

‘Cata, pick up the children, then

We’ll all away to the woods,

They say there’s a mighty army come

To steal our homes and goods,

They’re capturing slaves along the way

So we need to be aware,

These men of steel with their breastplates on

Take children with fair hair.’

Sca had looked at his wife, she had

The hair of ripened corn,

And so had both of their children from

The day that they were born,

But he was dark, from the Iceni

And his face was painted blue,

He’d come from the beach they’d landed on

Where the blood was mixed with dew.

‘I’ve never seen quite so many ships

They’re standing off in the bay,

And way on out, the horizon seems

To be filled with ships today,

They’re crushing all that’s before them,

Our chiefs are down on their knees,

They know we can’t over-awe them

With our spears and charioteers.’

‘This army’s bringing its mighty gods

And they have this one called Mars,

He rules, they say, each clashing of arms

From way up there in the stars,

Their shields are linked in a solid wall

That we can’t get through to fight,

They’ll rule us now as they rule the Gaul

So we must be gone tonight.’

They made their way to a hermit’s cave

And they found some shelter there,

But the Legion came and they took his wife

For the sake of her golden hair,

His children too, were taken away

From the land of their loving home,

And the people gasped in the marketplace

When the two were sold, in Rome.

While he fled back to the Iceni

And he waged guerrilla war,

Served in the army of Boadicea

Once she had come to the fore.

She stood, six foot and her tumbling hair

Was red, right down to her waist,

‘A terrible sight,’ the Romans said

As she laid their cities waste.

They’d stolen all of her lands and laid

The lash across her back,

They’d raped both of her daughters,

They were fond of doing that,

They didn’t know that the Iceni

As a tribe were more than bold,

Or of the terrible price they’d pay

When they cast her out in the cold.

She wiped out Camulodunum,

And slaughtered the Romans there,

Went on to sack Londinium,

This woman with flame red hair,

She burnt the city down to the ground

While the population fled,

The only people that stayed in town

Were lying in heaps, the dead!

They slew the Hispana Legion

That had marched down from the north,

Went on to Verulamium

And carried a flaming torch,

The Romans there were slaughtered,

The city razed to the ground,

But not before the warrior Sca

Had saved the wife he found.

She’d been enslaved in a Roman house

Had disappeared for years,

And when he pulled her out of the flames

She couldn’t see him for tears,

So they fled to the northern borders where

The Romans held no sway,

And their blond haired, blue-eyed offspring,

They still live there today.

David Lewis Paget

© 2013 David Lewis Paget

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TL Boehm

Fascinating tale. We don't get as much exposure to Celtic/British and Norse histories as we do Roman history to our detriment. I heard that Hadrian's wall wasn't built to keep the Romans in but to keep the Scots out because they were so ferocious they couldn't be conquered.