Time sheep-cropped the grass, overthrew the fort,
and cultivated beech tree and briar on the palisade.
It split the fissures that grinned in frost-cracked lime.
The greened stone coiled – thousand year old
snake-bones walled under rain-fed moss.
I tracked the course and trailed through woods
under the sodden canopy’s drip. I splashed
over tumbled dyke and ditch by Buckholt Road.
Un-nested from cold sleep, sun-invoked,
and bound with ivy around its stony scales,
the West Barrow slept full of bones.
Besides its serpent path twisted,
inscribed ten centuries ago, and faded
between the coppice and grove.
A vanished homestead and byre merged
with gloss-tongued ferns; and knotted roots
in pale Oolite, weathered to a darker grey:
fossil clams, embedded there.
Rough-cut blocks, held unsteady purchase
along the edge of bounds erased
before Ordnance Survey triangulated
the arcing elbow of the scarp.
Half-lost in mist, half hidden in ghostly boughs
ammonite, enclosure, roman wall, ramparts,
and stone; decaying among scattered memories.
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He is inspired by the landscapes of Max Ernst, by frenzied rocks towering in the air above the silent swamp, by the strange poetry of machines, by something hidden in the nothing.
His poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Liminality, and Penumbric. Oliver was awarded first place in the BSFS 2019 competition for his poem ‘Better Living through Witchcraft’ and his poem’Lost Palace, Lighted Tracks’ was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. In 2020 he was awarded a PhD in literary and critical studies for his thesis ‘Empty your Eyes and Bite the Star: Fragments, Entropy, Confabulation, and Structure in Cut-Up Methods’.
Oliver’s website is at httpsss://oliversimonsmithwriter.wordpress.com/
- Buckholt Wood - 6th January 2021
That is lovely