'rocks'

WILL STAVELEY

Red ones, white ones (black ones), blue,

Selling shares in something uncountable -

Rocks are one half of a united two:

The shore and the sea. Big boulder, puny pebble,

Each in their own mock the incessant tide

Inviting each to an unattended funeral.

Geology picks through the bones in pride,

Produces mere piss to spray the waves

As if that which is dead had not really died,

As if to study, identify, somehow saves

A part for posterity. Our arrogance:

Heaping knowledge like gold in hollowing caves,

Whose conceit hems back a hewn-in horizon

Whose end is unfailing and ever enough;

Suffices the space after its origin.

Life is balletic, but stillness is true;

That which life makes can only dishevel

The real with the plastic, immortal New.

As polystyrene, too-white among mollusc shell

flushes out the final hermits from where they hide

high on mountains, still hearing climate knell.

It will not be enough that the good tried -

The factory's an axe which fell and clave

The balance of poles, the sink from rise.

The rocks will forgive us, if they ever forgave,

If we pick out the pretty ones from particulate sand,

But forget preserving where once you had waded,

No - forget where they came from, grow old and then

You and your rocks, who once were young and rough,

Rounded, slip into the sea again.