Bronze, copper, gold:
the boats are on the sea,
sailing past,
sailing on the wind;
waved away by branches
almost bare now.
Ghosts man the boats;
passing silently
on currents of wind,
the year in their nets;
this one glorious moment
and then they have sailed.
Unlikely now: the size of your fist;
hard, smooth, rounded; chiselled by weather, abraded
in the billions of quartz, sandstone and granite stones
constantly rolling in the tide on this cold Atlantic shore.
Limestone. I, unlike them, sprung from life;
carry my ancestors within me; crinoids, brachiopods
and bryozoa; their shells, hard parts crystallized now;
I am an assemblage that collected on the bed of another sea;
a tropical sea that teemed with life and its colours.
How far away that bright life was from the lithification that comes,
but time, all too soon, brings its darkness
and I have spent millions of years deep in the inanimate earth.
That I would see light again seemed unlikely
and yet, here I am, carrying the vestiges of a sea that once was home.
As you pass over me, you will not notice;
but my voice is there, in the tumult of the waves shifting the stones.
