She’d lived alone since her husband left
Just after the fall of Rome,
Deep in the forest she’d kept herself
In the tangle of trees called home.
He’d left with one of the Legions, they
Recalled to defend the State,
Leaving Britain with Roman roads
And her people, left to their fate.

Aeronwy came from a Druid clan
From a mixture of kings and gods,
She’d never age in the forest glade
Where she lived with her hunting dogs.
She lived on berries and lived on fruits
And the **** that the dogs brought in,
But knew she never must see herself
Reflected in any spring.

‘For if you do,’ said a holy man
‘You will see that the years are fraught,
Your spells and philtres won’t help you then,
You’ll lose what the ancients taught.
The years will tumble over your breast
In a wave, and take your breath,
As long as you live in this vale of trees
You will be immune to death.’

She wept for the loss of her husband then
For he never came back home,
She didn’t know he’d been taken off
With his Legion, back to Rome.
They’d met when a hunting party came
To slaughter her Druid clan,
But she was spared, for her beauty there
Would entrance most any man.

He’d stayed with her in the forest glade
For a month of making love,
She prayed that he’d never leave her, in
A plea to the gods above,
She little knew of the world out there
Of the waning Roman’s might,
And so she wallowed in bitter tears
In her loneliness, each night.

Her time was not as the time for us,
Her minute was like our day,
The years would fly in her restless nights
As she dreamed her life away.
But she woke as fresh and as beautiful
As she’d been the night before,
While scores of agues and deadly plagues
Swept on, in a world at war.

The forest began to shrink as men
Fed wood to their kilns and fires,
What once had been a forest became
A wood, in the sight of spires,
She heard the clang of hammers on steel
At the factories rise and rise,
And soon her trees were surrounded by
New roads, and telephone wires.

Then men came into her forest glade
While cutting a new canal,
She hid in the corner, in the shade
As her trees began to fall.
One day she woke and the cut was there
With a little ****-backed bridge,
She mounted slowly, up to the top
And balanced over the edge.

She gazed down into the water that
Was still as a mirror’s sheen,
And saw the face that began to race
Through the thousand years she’d seen.
Her hair flew wide, and before she died
She muttered a weary moan,
‘I’d be content if it only meant
That my husband came back home!’

David Lewis Paget