Three Poems

Steve Etches’s Workbench

half-fossils protective glasses fins pipes hard tissue
not the face I was expecting
memorial bench
Darwin understood the crust of the Earth as a ‘history of the world imperfectly kept’
or a ‘vast museum’
paternal fascination with babies faces features ears
before clocks
Whitstable Mayday parade 1859
after clocks
the shingle wears the rock away to expose the fossil then the shingle wears that fossil away
a small blue dot      sand
a girl walks to the edge and throws a rock in
plum stones identified from the wreck of the Mary Rose, each unique
like a set of fingerprints
the bell at MEMO* will be rung every time a species becomes extinct
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