Avebury

Cretaceous landscape strikes its flints against the mind;
Here, stone clocks the long ceremony of the year
As light and water energize the earth’s limbs,
Bringing the giantess to bright fruition,
Where land and sky and underworld merge.
O, sanctuary of the seasons, hearth of the soul !
Sunrise and moonset align with the rivers
At the summer quarters, and the acts of the drama
Join in the round, mumming the cyclical play.

There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.

The Hag-Maiden is among us,
The corn dolly woven from the fall of the year.
West Kennet long barrow mothers the dead,
Her long hummock hugging the skyline
Along the hill’s electric spine;
Her eye watches everything, from every angle,
Surveying all four quarters, unblinking;
Her womb and vagina transform the loam-seed,
As she squats to drop her heavy load.
She is the ox ploughing deep furrows,
Turning with the heavens,
Fattened by the waxing moon.

Sere November stops the waters :
Nothing but stone and bone, and bare trees,
The bloodstream stilled, the power retracted,
Nothing but the skull-stare of empty skies.
The Winterbourne-Kennet snakes underground,
Sloughing its old skin in season,
And all is balanced on the horns of the ox.
Corpse with corpse, pot with skull,
The vibrant dead commune in dank chaos,
Seed-corn of the harvest to come.

In late October, the roebuck casts its antlers
And at once a new set starts to grow;
In late October, the doe is pursued in tight circle
By the buck around a tree, widdershins,
Flattening the grass,
Tracing a figure-of-eight.

The people drive the ox onto the bridge,
And drive his wounded body over the parapet,
Down, down into the river’s flow.
In the bridestone sockets myriads of snail shells
Lie buried, brought from the water,
Mazing the world in their spirals;
Again the spiral dance, the pacing
Of the grand design, the journey of the gods,
Into the eye of the storm.
The sacrifice lies crouched in foetal form,
Arms crossed in front of his face,
Lying on his right side, facing east,
A pot between his knees,
All his bones carefully broken,
And, placed on his body, the bones of a young ox.

Here the male and female are conjoined,
Riddling the serpentine maze,
Enacting the year’s procession,
Liturgy of earth and water.
What awesome energies writhe
In the serpent’s lengthy coils ?
The snake awakes from hibernation
And advances to the mating ground,
Swimming in the river of light.
Hail the ouroboros !
In spring the snakes writhe in lust;
By July the grass snake’s white eggs
And the adder’s young are everywhere,
Matching the harvest’s beginning.
The snake’s lidless eyes stare through you,
Unflinching,unblinking,never turning away.
The big-hipped bridestones dance like dervishes.
Their eyes and mouths are ever-open.
I make this fire from hazel, hawthorn and blackthorn.
Waden Hill stretches out her long body,
Where the white horse of the sky gallops along her back,
And the earth leaps like a hare.
The triangle of waters guards the seed.
Who will stop to drink from the fountain ?
At Swallowhead spring,
I feel the whole body of the Goddess,
Head, womb, anus and vulva,
Extended across the meadows.
Where streams meet and conceive the future,
Bride and groom come together
In midsummer marriage,
Exchanging golden rings.

The Devil’s Chair rears up high and wide,
Portal to other world,
Throne where the May maidens would sit
On May Day Eve, and make their wishes;
This mighty adderstone,
Congealed from the saliva
Of teeming vipers gathered together
At the high points of the year.

The twin snake heads meet in the henge,
Where the male snake inserts his head
Into the female’s jaws, and spurts his seed.

As I was walking out one morning, I met a buxom lass
Going to a dairyman, she had a field of grass,
It grew between mountains, at the foot of a spring,
She hired me to cut it down while the birds did sweetly sing.

Taurus rises over the henge at vernal equinox,
First the Pleiades, blessing the plough,
Bright Alcyone riding high on the Bull’s back.
Snakes coil under the marriage bed.

See the primeval mound risen from the waters,
The insular garden moated and fenced,
Home to Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Flint arrowhead pierces the sky
To let the rain through,
Flint sickle cuts the fattened corn
Under ox skull moon.

Tan Hill’s tender smooth pregnant swelling
Summons the spirit in prayer and exultation,
As the goddess squats in the fiery fields
And squeezes out the harvest in travail.
Every year a fair was held here on the summit,
On the feast of St Anne, under the August sun,
Blessed by the patroness of confinements,
When, in every village, a bowl of water
Would be placed on a stool by women,
To be used for divination, and hordes of people
Gathered on the hilltop, to trade horses, sheep and oxen,
Bartering and revelling with one gusto,
Drinking, dancing, sporting and brawling.