“Before Windmill Hill” by Oliver Smith
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He is inspired by Tristan Tzara, J G Ballard, and Max Ernst; by the poetry of chance encounters, by frenzied rocks towering above the silent swamp; by unlikely collisions between place and myth and memory.
His poetry has been published in Abyss & Apex, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Strange Horizons, and Sylvia Magazine and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2020 he was awarded a PhD in Literary and Critical Studies by the University of Gloucestershire. For more information see his website
A Word from the Author:
A few years ago, I was privileged to attend a reading by the Somali-British poet, Momtaza Mehri. Momtaza spoke about her families experience as refugees coming from Somalia and how they had found homes in various European states.
The history of the British Isles, since the end of the Younger Dryas ice age, is one of successive waves of migrants arriving and settling. Windmill Hill in the title is an archaeological site where some of those early peoples left signs of their presence in various ritual earthworks.
The poem asks how does a land become a homeland and how do we become native to it? How do we find our home?
Before Windmill Hill
Like a gull blown westering from the sea,
an immigrant, too-recently stranded
to yet belong, made fall. She sang and danced
upon an alien shore. Her pale feet
made beginnings and she kindled a fire
on the cold sands, to cook an oyster stew;
the recipe passed down from mouth to mouth;
a hundred ages, with a word for each
river, each green plant, each fantastic fruit,
each mountain. She named hearth and flower.
In the vale, she named home. She named hives
and crops and goats and kine. She named children
so they might be held like meat and milk
on her tongue; like music and love, like wheat
and honey. She stained her lips with memory
and her mouth smiled sweet with joy.
She danced upon the green hills, raised a stone
to guide her folk on the smooth chalk downs
above a serpent-river, where old gods swam,
slow and broad with moonlight. Downstream,
under the northern stars, she dug shallow
for crops, deep to rest the hearts of lovers
who dreamt with her of icy waves and held
her still, in dreams, lost in the years and days.
She found an end; stretched deep her roots and slept
cupped in the bowl of an oak. The tree curled
like an old woman’s tired fingers. Held her
as one native to the work of land and time.
She renamed herself soil and bone and lay
fire stained from the kiln; earth stained from the clay.
