Adventures in scansion! Your narrative proceeds, I think, Fliss, with your usual brio, and your poem is full of information. I do think it's very tough to make hexameter work in English, so you are a braver soul than I am! Well done for kicking the tires a bit and taking it out for a spin!
Also, I've always liked the word preamble.
Here's a poem inspired by an old Scottish folk song, written I'm sorry to say in my usual IP.
Mondegreen, for those who've not heard it and according to my sister Maggie, is a folk term meaning basically something heard in error: for "laid him on the green," people heard "Lady Mondegreen." Here's the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoFT3L4KdAM
And here's the poem:
Mondegreen
Some things are gone and won’t be coming back.
Behind us, you can see a golden glow –
as if that world of options we once knew
were lit by dawn or sunset. This is how
the Earl of Moray looks. The tune plays out;
the heart constricts. And who can say how much
our might-have-beens could shunt this train of being,
in its dull round, into the sort of place
where Moray
micht hae been the king? What dream
will cloud our waking eyes? What deed undone?
What dawn consigned to memory? The days
slip through our hands like water. Could the earl
come sounding in to where his lady sits
at her high seat? Could yesterday be calling
at our front door, as auld acquaintance might?
This waiting will not make it so. And when
dawn breaks, the round begins again. The light
of yesterday blinks out. The earl is dead.