Dancers and Drowners

Dancers and Drowners

By Oliver Smith

Between the moonlit sand and sea, ghosts dance

like glass-eels swimming in clear, deep waters,

like whispers, like distant, glimmering stars

that fall as fading cinders, as the last

fire is extinguished upon homely-shores.

Between the moonlit sand and sea, ghosts dance

with shrouded faces. Our lamp’s light is cast

upon these strangers, but only dim features

like whispers, like distant glimmering stars

recall the beloved who crossed into the dark.

Yet we come still to remember lost futures

between the moonlit sand and sea. Ghosts dance

among the shrimp and anemone, masked

by weed and sand and time. Those voyagers

like whispers, like distant glimmering stars

ignite, burn, and fade again. Do not ask

the strangers on the dark strand who they are.

Between the moonlit sand and sea, ghosts dance

like whispers, like distant glimmering stars.

* * *

Oliver Smith 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 been published in ‘Abyss & Apex’, ‘Bleed Error’, ‘Ink, Sweat, and Tears’, ‘Strange Horizons’ and ‘Sylvia Magazine’ and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2020 Oliver was awarded a PhD in Literary and Critical Studies by the University of Gloucestershire for his thesis ‘Empty your Eyes and Bite the Star: Fragments, Entropy, Confabulation, and Structure in Cut-up Methods’. (website)

On "Dancers and Drowners"

I see the ghosts in the poem as beings distanced from us by death, by time, by space. They were once presences but have become absences and it is these absences we feel; the empty spaces they have left behind.

I like the villanelle as a form and get quite carried away by the formal challenge. This one evolved from a short piece of cut-up poetry and developed quite an elegiac mood; unusually for my villanelles the refrains are unvaried. See also ‘Séance’ in ‘The Horror Zine’, October 2022 and ‘Evocatus’ in ‘Eye to the Telescope 44’.

October's End

October's End
By Oliver Smith

We approach October’s end, as if October
were a road laid through dusky meadows,
where the ancient stag-headed oaks
have faded; tawny-red beneath the dying sun.
We walk on through the stubble of gold-reaped
wheat, decaying in fields by the winding highway.
Walk on through days that hold ever closer
now the night.

We approach October as a path to be trod,
a way to be beaten, and an end to meet.
Behind us, the yellow valley-lights all glow;
the air smoky; charcoal scented from fires
of summer-seasoned wood. Safe in the coomb,
below kind blue hills, lovers sleep
in the sweetness of new-bottled wine.
No more bright days on October’s road.

Do not ask the way we are led; as its path
guides us alone among the grassy tombs
of ancients kings, fat with memories
of summer-no-more. Here the lush autumn’s
fruit tends more to seed, yet still intoxicates
the drowsy wasps; whose song is muted
with love-sickness; enchanted and lost
in the hidden heart of their undying queen.

Who is this darker shadow that walks
beside us through the twilight of October lanes?
We may meet them under the cockerel tree.
We may meet them at the bridge’s broken stream.
We may meet them by the midnight crossroads
at October’s End, on the moonlit green,
where pumpkin lanterns grin beneath
the empty eye of a frost-white skull.

All the way to October’s end we have come.
The lantern that lit our path grows dim.
Its flame gutters and we button our coats
at the hooting of the barn owl, hunting near.
A little winter chill kissed our bones
as colder mists rose enchanted in the starlight.
By the abandoned pond, a frog grows torpid
and dreams, now, some half-remembered prince.

* * *

Oliver Smith (website) 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. 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’.

Where do you get the ideas for your poems?
"October’s End" lays out a landscape of time and memory. When I was eighteen, and an art student, I walked everywhere. Life had a rhythm of spending the days painting and the evenings in country pubs and that life persisted for perhaps four years or five years. I see now it was the end of a culture where drinking every night was normal and every village had at least one pub, almost every street corner in the town had a pub; pubs were what we did, who we were. The days and the people and the places seemed timeless and only the changing seasons tracked the wheel of the years spinning away from us. In the autumn the smoky sun would be setting as a gang of boys and girls set out along unlit country roads, up one hill or another in search of a pub.

Sometimes we followed a strange old snake of a road that fizzled out at the Witcombe Roman Villa. Unlike most lanes it was unhedged and wriggled across the open fields and up the gentle rise towards Cooper’s Hill. If we took that road we’d head up through the beech trees of Buckholt and Brockworth woods to ‘The Black Horse’. Hips and haws and crab-apples glowed like jewels even as the green faded from the trees and the leaves turned gold. On the edge of the escarpment an iron cockerel sat on the top of a maypole; it had been there as long as anyone could remember, watching over the Vale of Gloucester. I sat at its foot as the stars came out, and below the lights of a hundred villages ignited like fireworks in the purple dusk.

Lovers' Leap

Lovers' Leap
by Oliver Smith
We walked in the woods and you said:
There’s a lady in the ancient ash
upside-down down she dangles
with her heart-sap beating
with greener passions in the shadow.
Her long toes flexible
as spring willow
and wrapped around the branches
in the canopy
where crows and rooklings roost.
Her body’s dressed in ivy growth;
dragon-foot leaves curling tight
about the voluptuous pith and root:
her limbs and bark and heart
ripened in the new born sun.


Mrs Nightshade is in the thicket
down by the Roman stream.
She winks her witch’s eye
and flexes three-foot fingers grey
and gnarled like old bone-oak poking
through the Trompe du Mort.
Her thistle-down breath
whistles in her spider-teeth,
as you pass she taps her nails hard
as belemnites in the limestone hollow
by the stonebreaker’s path
where her children
chase like woodlice
through the fallen leaves
in the coppice all gone wild.


Then you said come to my nest
High up in the linden tree.
Where you lay your head upon my shoulder:
Your hair curled like woodbine
binding in the bough;
and on your breath the scent
of foxglove, valerian, and monkshood
all flowering in the wood.
and you said “now you have met
my sisters I suppose you can stay.”
And the hollow stemmed hemlock
growing in white-star clumps
rattled their dried-up heads
and gossiped in the absent wind.

* * *
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. His poetry regularly appears in Spectral Realms and has also been published in Illumen, Eye to the Telescope, and Three Drops in the Cauldron. His prose has been included in anthologies from, among others, Flame Tree Publishing and Ex-Occidente Press, who also published a collection of his short stories, Stars Beneath the Ships. Much of his previously published work is collected in Basilisk Soup and Other Fantasies.

Oliver is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. His website is at https://oliversimonsmithwriter.wordpress.com/

Where do you get the ideas for your poems?

During the warm summers I would often walk a road through Cranham Woods coming home from the pub in a neighboring village: late at night, in pitch-black tunnels of
trees, glowworms would come out and shine like little green stars in the dark. The Beech, Oak, Linden, Ash, Hazel, and Willow grew thick with ivy, woodbine and wild
clematis and the air was full of the smell of wild honeysuckle blossom coming from deep in the trees.

When the trees thinned and I emerged into moonlight I passed Roman ruins and Saxon furrows still visible and knew even older barrows and earthen fortifications were hidden deeper in the woods. The geology of the hills was Cretaceous and Jurassic - at the Fiddler’s Elbow, overlooking the Vale of Gloucester, fossil limpets, urchins and cockle shells spilled out of exposed patches of inferior oolite in the disused quarry.

In those wooded silent places on warm summer nights geological time, pre-history, ancient history, and the present all intertwined like the wild creepers and vines
growing over the trees. I thought I could grow roots deep into that soil too.