On Some Primeval Shore

On Some Primeval Shore I No soul sees: The sun is hot, the water’s warm, No children laugh, no joggers run; On sandy beach no footprints are left; No bathers splash, no sea-gull’s cry, not one No humans observe: Torrents of water from far-distant mountains Through alpine ravine with slopes of scree, With fragments of tree-fern and coarse sandy grit – Now sluggish and slow and dropped out to sea. No person hears: A rumble of thunder across the strand; Raindrops spot the beach before the tide Now spreads its mud across the sand, And wavelets with silt the ripples hide. II Investigation: “Sir”, he cries, “that boulder, on the shore!” The students they watch as chisel strikes the block The fissile gritstone begins to crack; “more!” They cry; it splits, they stare, “see, the rock……..” Revelation: No sitting in class, no passage in book, I swear, Can grip the mind and so amaze As now the sight on which the pupils stare - A hidden revelation as pupils gaze. Understanding: Their minds now thrill at what’s before, Gritstone is split; a gasp of breath: A scene revealed - a sandy shore: Ripples in the sand and a shower that passed. 18 December 2012 Notes about this poem: This poem was written from the memories of a geological field trip to Whitby in North Yorkshire, UK, with a group of sixth-form students in 1963 and the rain-pitted sandstone rock that adorns my desk. The first section refers to the formation of the Upper Lias (Jurassic) Deltaic Sandstones of Whitby some 170 million years ago and the events that took place then. In ‘No Person Hears’ verse the reference is to the advance of the tide where the wavelets spread fine mud into the rain-spots and, as time passes, preserves these as the whole area subsides under hundreds of feet of later deposits of sandy sediment over hundreds of thousands of years in a subsiding ‘geosyncline’ and the sand becomes compressed and cemented as gritstone. The second section refers to the events that took place in 1963.