Leafing through the Latin Dictionary

fuga, fugas — music now, not back
at school where Harry Roberts flashed his gown,
a toga to berate a class as slack
as Rome became; we’d been meant to be
English Augustans, but were soon brought down
to being worthy only of a few
emotive Saxon nouns and verbs: the sea
had brought our Fathers to a sanded shore,
packed tight with iron sermons on The Poor —
but still the dictionary had work to do:
peregrinus, wanderers in need
of some Virgilian outcome — might this book
have shown how Europe’s words could safely bleed
on strands Aeneas left to Captain Cook?

oppidanus — not from Rome, but not
from Eton either: if from anywhere
we hailed from pissed-on concrete and caked snot,
a gravel-rash battalion called up for
training in Real Estate and Prostate snips —
no worse for that, but somewhere off there lurked
a world whose words were from a greater law,
the Pax Britannica, a king in sight,
an Empire wider than a day and night,
the home boys set to die among the ships —
spero, spes — we hoped and now it’s here,
the Trading-up Republic, confident
of its own sparky Roman atmosphere
and timeo, to fear the gifts we’re sent.