The White Horse Surveys Silbury Hill by Giles Watson's poetry and prose

<b>The White Horse Surveys Silbury Hill</b> Thirty-five million basketfuls of chalk, Stone, rubble, soil, excavated chunk By chunk with antler-spades, stone Axes, sweat, blisters, deaths of strong Men – and passed, man to woman, Woman to man, in a ragged line, worn With fatigue – and not ever dumped, But sculpted, stepped, rounded, heaped, Into a hill filled with offerings: bone, Mistletoe, ox-ribs, flint, moss. Brawn Made it, but also brain. Whole lives Flowed and ebbed. Autumn leaves Dropped from trees a hundred And fifty times. Men murdered, Made love, sowed, reaped, ploughed, Sowed through short lives, plod By plod, until one day, it was built. But why it was built, and what burnt As sacrifice at its summit, no one Remembers. The motive is all gone, And the White Horse was not engraved In turf in those days. If they grieved Some chieftain, wrapped in moss, Time devoured his stripped remains. Brachiopods in the White Horse’s eye Open like watches. He scores the sky In a holding-pattern. BMWs break Speed-limits on the A-road, brook No compromise with time, and miss It all in their frenzied quest for bliss. <b>Poem by Giles Watson, 2012.</b> The facts and figures relating to the building of Silbury Hill - a gigantic Neolithic mound shaped like a barrow, but with a ziggurat-structure underlying it, and containing no human remains – are derived from Aubrey Burl’s authoritative study, <i>Prehistoric Avebury</i>, Yale University, 1979, pp. 131-133. An arterial road passes close by Silbury Hill, and the Ridgeway terminates at this point. The hair-raising speed with which many motorists negotiate this sacred landscape is a source of constant grief and irritation. Silbury Hill is the tallest prehistoric structure in Europe, but was built before metal tools were invented.