Camulodunum, Hannah Patient

Roman walls run through the town like veins,
surfacing in unexpected places.
A restaurant in a subterranean cave:
walls painted with Italian coves,
plates heaped with food, the far-off tang
of Sicilian lemonade.

What did the Romans think, patrolling roads
they smoothed out and made straight?
Sick of being stuck out in this swamp,
amidst these unfamiliar scenes:
kingfishers hidden in reed-beds, rivers,
flat white skies. Surely they missed Italy.

Colchester was an adopted home for me.
I came from the same town as Marconi –
read the Metamorphoses, wondered at the ghosts
whose shadows flickered on the flinty walls
of Colchester Castle at the sixth-form ball.

I’m back now, after several years away.
I have since been to Rome. Colchester’s roads
and roundabouts and bleak housing estates
seem dreary, dull and grey. But something
pulls my heartstrings just the same:
the potency of two years in this place –
friends with whom I’ve since lost touch.
After school, we’d go to the arcade
and numb ourselves with all the lights and noise;
the blinking silver falls, one-sided netball games.

My friends and I were so unhappy here.
But all that’s over now –
and Colchester is just a blameless town.
Feelings and memories fade –
like the half-heard tramp of legions’ feet
on the long straight road
that takes them far away.