Back in 2005 I published Mementoliths, a wee pamphlet where each poem was introduced by a short piece of writing on a geological or mineral topic related to the poem.
This one was inspired by a trip with a friend to a quarry near Middleton, Midlothian. She thought it was a quarry she'd visited as a child with her late father. She described it to me, and I thought it sounded wonderful, but I couldn't place it. So we went to Middleton, and it wasn't like that at all. It was...
The Wrong Quarry
The Wrong Quarry
Blue
flakes litter the grey sky bowl.
We
pick our careful way
between
squelch and slide,
totter
and bog-soak.
A
steady breeze removes
the
heat of walking
from
spoil-heap to cart-track.
We
reach the carved cliff
and
peck among sharpened talus,
seeking
the pearly glyphs
of
prehistory among industrial shards.
A mud
burrow in the sandy stone
reveals
a creature's traces
like
the curling whiff of smoking cordite
from a
dropped gun
beside
an absent victim.
It's
all about the tectonics of memory
shuffling
continental fragments;
how a
wedge of childhood
docks
against the hard foreland
of an
adult's dreams. Yet though
pink
spikes of orchids drift
through
the purple tufts of thistles
the way
they always did,
the
rocks have moved away,
buried
or eroded. Time subducts
experience,
when no-one checks
in the
missing years. What's left
is
mystery, uncertainty, the lost clues
to map
our Polar Wandering Curve
and
reunite a personal Gondwana.
Copyright © Colin Will 2005
Copyright © Colin Will 2005
