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Poet's
Corner
Palaeosmilia
by Archie Lamont
The poem in this issue leads from the article
by Eric Robinson, who remembers the geologist Archie Lamont.
This is one of Archie's poems, a sonnet, written
in 1930 and taken from his Selected Poems, published in 1946. Eric's
article centres around his own quest to find out more about the tombstone
in question.
Dedicated to a
fellow tombstone geology
PALAEOSMILIA
Two hundred
years did the dark limestone hold
A script,
but all the letters have been lost;
The dead lie
nameless. Acids of the mould,
Sharp agencies
of wind, crystals of frost,
The drifting
rain, the sun, the winter cold,
Splintering
tightest atomies apart,
Shew forth
the hidden threads of corals old
On the smooth
stone traced with minutest art.
Over the myriad
centuries between
Nature remains
thus faithful to her own,
Dissepiments
like a thin veil are seen
About the
theca of the hollow cone,
Calyx, tabulae,
septa live again
Longer than
bones and epitaphs of men. |
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