More geology

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

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