Vindolanda  Reverie

Among the restorations and relics
we piece together what we imagine
could have been a life as a Wall soldier
from Tungria or Hibernia.
Perhaps we'd have been a clerk
writing on sheets of wood a millimetre thick
and used a sponge in the toilet
as paper hadn't been commissioned.

Even then there would have been
incompetent and glassy-eyed overseers
conversing with messengers from the Empire
many leagues above us
which is what we always forget over our
William Wyler epics.
We the little people now gawping
wouldn't have been
that much larger in those days.

I'd have grabbed I take it a pen
though naturally they could have deprived
anyone of an education
but at the very least even if a slave
I'd have tried the Epictetus trick
and got a name for canniness
or else wangled out a marvellous fish
sauce, the rage of Rome.

That's what I think, but if so,
why haven't I achieved anything comparable
in a modern world? 

                   All I've done is incur the
odium of a number of magazine editors
who seem not to demand too much from their
contributors save that they remain
like themselves
irremediably SMALL.