The Peculiar Taste of Wild Olives*

(i.m. Robert Graves)

Wild olives out of red earth

(Blood of past praise and death) first tasted in a crooked orchard that clung on crumbling terraces — the peculiar taste of wild olives all the green of the world in their green smooth skins.

High above that valley where the roofs of Soller swam in incalculable light it was a taste bitter as Spain's history yet simple as poetry.

All of our long climb through the small sierras we savoured it the peculiar taste of wild olives. It was like having tasted civilisation for the very first time.

William Oxley

* this poem was first printed in In the Drift of Words, Rockingham Press, 1994. Reproduced with permission of the author.