Eighteen hundred years ago
Caesar’s eagle soared imperiously
Above Gaul’s impassioned bur ragged resistance,
Constructing its impregnable eerie here, at Chassey.
Eighteen thousand years or more ago
Neolithic man sought that self-same security
In its rocky outcrops and elevations,
Unparalleled vision in all directions.
Colonists of both epochs
Left the echoes and reverberations
Of their lives and lease upon the landscape
In pottery shards, adze-cut flints,
Die straight roads and strange place-names.
Today comes the all-conquering Tourist horde,
Not of one nation, but of all:
A hegemony borne of high-intensity homogeneity
Consuming culture, environment: even history,
In an unsatiable, unstopable, leisure-lust orgy.
And pray, what legacy will the Tourists leave
What tale of them will the future weave?
Tony Jolley
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/colonists-legacies/
