Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Brachiopods
Brachiopods
I picked one out of the Ridgeway chalk,
its muppet-gape clogged with calcium
straight out of the Palaeozoic.
It fitted snugly in my hand, a little white
talisman connecting me to ancient seas
where my ancestors lived in slime,
a chink in time. And now, here’s another
that was living last week, ripped
from its pedicle by a summer storm,
empty of flesh, a fossil freshly dead,
whose descendants, still whitely identical,
will outlive us all, inscrutable on the ocean bed.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2017.
Brachiopods
Brachiopods
I picked one out of the Ridgeway chalk,
its muppet-gape clogged with calcium
straight out of the Palaeozoic.
It fitted snugly in my hand, a little white
talisman connecting me to ancient seas
where my ancestors lived in slime,
a chink in time. And now, here’s another
that was living last week, ripped
from its pedicle by a summer storm,
empty of flesh, a fossil freshly dead,
whose descendants, still whitely identical,
will outlive us all, inscrutable on the ocean bed.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2017.