Picnic at the White Horse

Cut into the smooth hillside turf

a big-eyed beast stretches across, 

elongated and abstract, a modern design,

fertility symbol, or a sacred icon?

We lie, covered in sunburn,

our picnic of warm street tastes

in paper.

She likes the colourful kites 

swaying in the uplift,

I marvel about the dramatic gully and deep

bowl curving in sculptural lines

to where the ground drops further 

towards a small outcrop, an upturned bowl. 

I had known about Dragon Hill, 

where St George slew the dying beast, 

its blood poisoned the ground for ever.

We stroll under the solitary Fairy tree,

smell the winds, trace ladybirds along

the leaf-veins.

Above us a series of bumps,

the “pillow mounds”, from the Bronze Age.

A sheep, suddenly planted, stands,

ready to sprint away any second -

We are being watched as by the spirits

of monks from the long-gone Abingdon Abbey

performing their ritual scouring, as they did

900 years ago, on the figure they saw as a horse.

She insists that it looks more of a dragon, 

a mystical creature no less mysterious 

than its namesake, a faint constellation

twisting around the north celestial pole

and lying between Ursa Major and Cepheus.

A crescent moon makes us leave before

darkness falls. Riddles remain, still kept alive for us,

we, the riddles of the universe.