Dark Days
The day the Romans left
some Britons went down to the docks
to jeer the legionnaires shoving off.
And others shivered with a premonition
of dark days.
“We’ll be overrun with Saxons, damn it,”
some complained.
Others tried to find a plumber,
frustrated, to be sure,
but unaware
that there would be no plumber
for a thousand years.
John Schenck
| Winston Churchill mentions the millennium-long lack of indoor plumbing in Britain in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I like to imagine the first day of that. This poem is from an as-yet unpublished collection of poems, Sanctuary. |