Boudicca looks down at her feet
Weeps for her sons and daughters

She did not suffer her defeat
To stand idle by such slaughters

In bronze cast solid, firm and still
But within a soul yet breathing

Her immortal gaze and will
Stir English hearts when seething

A looming shadow comes o’er head
Lit tower with Ol’ Ben singing

Within its walls lie hearts now dead
No honour, but hands a’ wringing

“I drove the Roman from these banks
He took my strength for naught

Yet those who rule you want their thanks
Their duties – none or bought

My flesh defiled upon my ground
Iceni’s tribe in pain

This apathy that you have found
means daughters cry in vain

I drank my poison at the last
My death on terms I wrote

Your poison keeps you from the past
Though lumps form in your throat

I see you all well up with tears
But not know what you’re losing

Your minds are full of haunts and fears
Your bodies always bruising

Have you the will to leave your bed?
Those pleasures? Walking sleep?

My Britons would all best be dead
Than tended to like sheep

Awake my people! Be you stirred!
Ask – which the greater sin?

The wolf that prowls about the herd
Or the one that let him in?”

– Luke Torrisi is a retired legal practitioner and now an academic researcher and host of Carpe Diem, Sydney’s only explicitly Traditionalist and Paleoconservative radio programme broadcasting on 88.9FM, between 8:00 to 10:00pm, Mondays.

Editorial note:

• The poem opens with the lines “Boudicca looks down at her feet | Weeps for her sons and daughters“. This work has been inspired by the recent terror attack in the United Kingdom, and in particular, the image of the iconic Queen of the Iceni, commemorated in bronze, which overlooks the carnage in central London. Boudicca led a local uprising against the foreign occupying forces of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. The insurrection was crushed, but the memory of the revolt has for centuries inspired patriotic Britons who cherish their nation’s sovereignty against overwhelming odds, military and political.

SydneyTrads is the web page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young professionals who form part of the Australian independent right (also known as “non-aligned right”).