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Written and read by Anthony Fisher
Londinium
Put your ear to the ground –
hear the shouts of rotten flesh,
the clash of smith and wheel wright,
twist and stretch of the rope maker.
Your eyes will sting with the scent
of wood smoke, run with the bite
of ammonia from foetid urine.
Long below all this runs
the mark of Boudicca’s revenge
in the thin, red slice of burnt iron;
splitting a line of ash and clay
layered in the stones and tiles,
wood, old fires and bones.
Now squeezed by North and South
within its mud-soft lined canal;
the river once nurtured Neanderthal,
Homo Sapiens; lonely itinerants
drifting by for half a million years.
The first hut 15,000 years ago,
now a city of a myriad tongues
that adopts all who come –
hunter, farmer, the dispossessed.
© Anthony Fisher, February 2011
English.
Is spoken by about 2 Billion people worldwide and by most of London’s population of 8,600,000. At any one time, 2 billion are learning English.
It is derived from one of the Germanic groups which in themselves arise out of Proto-Indo European which was probably first spoken in Eastern Europe in 3,500 BCE. Modern English is made up from more than 350 different languages hence itsrichness and versatility. In the beginning, it was not used by the native population. When London was built by the Romans in 47 CE Latin would have been its language. English first formed into a distinct language in about 600 to 800 BCE. Chaucer was the first writer to give English literary status in the 12th century and it was the Victorians who first began to call it a “World Language”.