SearchOh, if I were an Iron-Age warrior
Only a Saxon maiden making love
Or the clangour of battle-cries
Would I suffer to wake me.
No puny toy with a feeble bleep
Or digital display would bully me
To wake. One blow of my chain-mailed
Fist would see to that.
Seven o’clock.
Bleep bleep bleep
Sleep
Is stolen.
Eight o’clock.
Radio One Breakfast Show on the road.
Same streets, same cars
Same job, same faces
Is a routine that kills
More surely than the Viking’s sword
And more slowly,
A living death -
Like ghosts we haunt the corridors of our lives
Imprisoned in perpetual routine,.
Today, tomorrow, yesterday - who cares -
They’re all the same.
Oh, if I were an Iron-Age warrior
I would disdain this dullness,
Drain the drinking-horn and laugh,
Boast of brave battle-deeds,
Sing of the shield-wall and the sword,
The longship and the lance,
And along the whale’s-road
Oceans of freedom to explore.
But I am a local government officer
In the twentieth century,
I wield a pen
And my boss tells me when to breathe.
© Arthur. All rights reserved by the author.
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