An extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems
Time travellers
Lyme Regis, Dorset, England
They did not come here to die. Who does?
These stony time-travellers
sunbaking along the shoreline.
Wrinkled features peering towards the waves,
they sit coiled side by side
as if trapped in a laboratory show-case.
Deck-chair ammonites, escaping
oil wells, gas fields, tar sands,
make this coast a permanent vacation.
They've been this way so long
they're too petrified to move: decades pass in familiar
scents and salts, the same view of the Cobb.
Grayscale glass plates and climate change histograms,
past and future,
old bones become ancient shells on the beach.
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Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems
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