Hadrian's Wall
Around the old blown names
Birdoswald, Cawfields or Vindolanda,
each fortress and straight line of stone
partition was built by a zealous emperor
to keep out the barbarous.
I’ve come to this wall crowning England,
this symbol of divided man,
to honour the lineage of our tall ideals;
to ask, the more stacked, the more shielded
a haven, the cleaner the blood?
Where will our walls finally end? In
the gigabytes of our biometric online
lives, in our passports? To keep us
from trespass, will our walls be raised
watchful as the Great Firewall of China?
