Science  Write  Now

A ribbon of morning-lit glitter reaches the rocks
through the sweep of sea from the horizon, out
near the edge of the Sydney Basin. That hole


into which all manner of debris fell after
the Great Dying. I recall the vista of blue
from the jagged peak of Mt Tomaree, finding


islands in the sun, a Gould’s petrel flying
below and that rush of feeling, though you
weren’t there. Sandstone I’m sitting on now


is two-fifty-two million years old; I’m learning
from a geologist on the move, his arms wide
with the verve of this ancient story: of river


energies, flood plains and sediment brought
down. Images of swamped land have inundated
our screens, of water draining south, no longer


to forests of Glossopteris, that Gondwanan seed-
bearer. Now I know it took ten thousand years
to form a metre of coal, dark driver of change.


He’s showing the group pumice from the under-
sea explosion only a dozen years ago. And he’s
reading an overhang like a book he’s learnt


by heart. I think of you, our different ways,
as he points to cross-beds and current flow,
bands of varied sizes and aquifer water under


pressure. We’re soon to find iron-rich fossilised
trunks lying willy-nilly, but I’m stuck on tension
between plates or any-two-things close like

 
you and me, and the stresses of our years,
scant stuff on the earth’s clock, yet here we are
by a graceful force, having scaled any upheavals.