Time-trapped there – like photographs in stone
they lie where shimmering limestone cliffs
bake in the day. Wave-patterned sand-hills drift
in red,  grit-littered wind.
Where windmills spin
and suck at dust, dams pock the plain and lie
crack-patterned underneath
a February sky.

When these things lived they lay in green here.
Waves weren’t scoured in sand, they flecked the light
That filtered fathoms down. The sand was white.
Weeds swayed the way the tide ran,
shadows fanned
across the ocean floor as currents swirled
on shoreward through a clean,
deep, sea-dimmed, silent world.

*

And now if some strange, unkind twist in time
restored their sparks of life, I doubt they’d find
the climate to their taste – or like the view.