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