Untitled Document

Josephine

In history we coloured maps, drew boundaries
together we forged an alliance across the classroom's divide.
We shared smokes, coloured pencils, notes on diplomacy.
Our relations a slow thawing of an isolationist policy.

Then we became Jacobins - cried liberty, fraternity
and began the overthrowing of the ancien regime.
We became caught up in our own revolutionary fervour,
and welcomed the coming of the Age of Enlightenment.

That winter like Napoleon we marched south crossing borders.
We camped out, an army ready for the advance.
In the Spring beyond the Alps we found a new world of complexity
with frontiers as flexible as knicker elastic.

Historically, this term should have been the undoing
but we skipped Waterloo and went to the cinema instead.
We read the next chapter 'Romantics and Revolutionaries'
and left to others the job of putting lines on the map.

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