Lowlands-L Members' Gallery

Note: In the second half of the second century CE, the northeastern border of the Roman Empire was the Danube River. Claiming that Germanic tribes were preparing for incursions into Empire territory, Roman armies pre-empted the situation by invading Germanic lands, crossing the river into present-day Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Romania. The Germanic peoples, led by a well-organized tribe called the Markomanni (meaning “border people”), resisted the Romans for nearly thirty years, all along the Danube. The war was lost by the Markomanni, but the Goths climbed from relative obscurity to a position of might and prominence amongst the Germanic tribes. They also used the war as an opportunity to scout out new territories near the Black Sea. Several decades after the end of the war, the Goths entered a mass migration southward.
This poem/song was inspired by the rescue archaeology beginning in the mid-1990s in Poland in the path of a new natural gas pipeline that now stretches over 1,300 km. of northern Polish plain, where the Gothic tribes were located in the second century.
One group of especially poignant and fascinating graves found by the scientists was in the southeast section of a major burial ground. In those particular graves they found pottery vessels containing only small pieces of bone together with traces of hair. All of those graves had appeared suddenly, and

“in terms of absolute chronology this … would correspond to the years 166–180, [when] the so-called Marcomannic Wars were taking place in the area of the Danube. It is possible to suggest that a group of men from the community served by [that] cemetery took part in them and these graves represent the graves of warriors who did not return from a distant military operation, but who had fallen in fighting in the south and were buried there. Returning comrades brought only a few small fragments of bone which in symbolic form were placed in urns and buried in the cemetery.” (From Dr. Tomasz Skorupka, Poznan Archaeological Museum, Kowalewko, Oborniki Commune: Biritual cemetery of a population of the Wielbark Culture, Poznan, Poland, 2001).

I walked today in the forest-pounding rain, and
Scratched for food on the barren forest floor;
Crying for my own sons three,
Who marched away to the Markomannic War.

Three bearskinned riders came out of the mist,
They carried three cold clay stone jars,
They greeted me as the dark rains poured, saying
“Here are your sons from the Markomannic War.”

How dare you bring me these jars of bones,
These three lone locks of Ingun hair,
For the Danube claimed none of your clan,
While my sons died in the Markomannic War.

They laid the jars in their shallow graves
In the southeast corner of the hallowed moor,
Like so many others of our village men,
Who answered the drums to the Markomannic War.

I stood in anguish while the willow birches wept,
They sprinkled their leaves under darkling skies,
To make a soft quilt for my boys to lie under,
Next to the Vistula’s rippling sighs.

Behind the front that we bloodily held
The Amal Family made its silent secret way
To the southern lands they promised would be ours,
While our children died in the Markomannic War.

I can only throw stones with these crippled old hands,
But I wish I could throw more,
I would kill every Amal royal in our land,
For murdering my sons in your Markomannic War.