Giles Watson's poetry and prose
The White Horse High-Tails It Over Avebury
The White Horse High-Tails It Over Avebury
It’s that calm arrangement of objects
On a gigantic scale that pleases him
Every time: ditches excavated, mounds
Piled by spades made of shoulderblades
Of oxen, man-killing sarsens transported
On tree trunks, with ropes of nettle
To hold them steady, the thunderous
Clump of Silbury raised out of piles
Small as molehills, the Sanctuary –
Its burden of dead flensed by kites –
And great stone-mouthed barrows,
Where skulls and longbones were filed
Like books in libraries, for future
Reference. The White Horse knows
There is nowhere like it in the world.
Tests of Cidaris give him goosepimples;
There are tremors amongst ancient
Corals in his tail. Then there is the church
Hanging outside the cursus, like
A satellite, or a menhir from a missing
Avenue of stones split by fire
For building houses, and those
Modern roads, gouging through
The village, channelling buses
From Swindon to Devizes. And
To think: the whole place was once
An ocean full of Belemnites
Who preyed, ate, waned, died,
Transmuted to bullets of stone.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2012. The man-killing propensities of the gigantic sarsen stones at Avebury were gruesomely attested in 1938, when the skeleton of a man (called the ‘Barber-Surgeon’ because he was carrying a pair of scissors and a surgical probe or lance, along with three coins dated 1320-1325) was discovered beneath one of the stones whilst attempting to bury it in the earth. It is a fitting testimony to the skills of the Neolithic architects of the Avebury complex that successive attempts at the erasure of their efforts have failed to obscure the grandeur of their achievement. The church, and many of the houses in the village which is partly encompassed by the Avebury Rings were built out of splinters of sarsen. These were obtained from the standing stones by lighting fires beneath them, causing untold destruction of the archaeological record, and yet somehow leaving the enduring power of the place quite undiminished. Indeed, it could be argued that all of these comparatively recent developments have only served to enhance the mystique of the place, and further energise its genius loci.
The White Horse High-Tails It Over Avebury
The White Horse High-Tails It Over Avebury
It’s that calm arrangement of objects
On a gigantic scale that pleases him
Every time: ditches excavated, mounds
Piled by spades made of shoulderblades
Of oxen, man-killing sarsens transported
On tree trunks, with ropes of nettle
To hold them steady, the thunderous
Clump of Silbury raised out of piles
Small as molehills, the Sanctuary –
Its burden of dead flensed by kites –
And great stone-mouthed barrows,
Where skulls and longbones were filed
Like books in libraries, for future
Reference. The White Horse knows
There is nowhere like it in the world.
Tests of Cidaris give him goosepimples;
There are tremors amongst ancient
Corals in his tail. Then there is the church
Hanging outside the cursus, like
A satellite, or a menhir from a missing
Avenue of stones split by fire
For building houses, and those
Modern roads, gouging through
The village, channelling buses
From Swindon to Devizes. And
To think: the whole place was once
An ocean full of Belemnites
Who preyed, ate, waned, died,
Transmuted to bullets of stone.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2012. The man-killing propensities of the gigantic sarsen stones at Avebury were gruesomely attested in 1938, when the skeleton of a man (called the ‘Barber-Surgeon’ because he was carrying a pair of scissors and a surgical probe or lance, along with three coins dated 1320-1325) was discovered beneath one of the stones whilst attempting to bury it in the earth. It is a fitting testimony to the skills of the Neolithic architects of the Avebury complex that successive attempts at the erasure of their efforts have failed to obscure the grandeur of their achievement. The church, and many of the houses in the village which is partly encompassed by the Avebury Rings were built out of splinters of sarsen. These were obtained from the standing stones by lighting fires beneath them, causing untold destruction of the archaeological record, and yet somehow leaving the enduring power of the place quite undiminished. Indeed, it could be argued that all of these comparatively recent developments have only served to enhance the mystique of the place, and further energise its genius loci.