‘Blue Lias Cliffs’ by Rosamund Taylor

Mary Anning (1799-1847) sought fossils when they were exposed by storms in the crumbling cliffs around Lyme Regis, to sell in order to support herself and her family.

The waves I can barely see for the rain
but I feel them in my feet: the boom and tug,
shingle shivers. I’m likely to forget the shades
of a fire in the grate, but I know colours of shale,

rain-grey, seal-grey, blue-grey. Black. My feet
stupid with cold while the men hide in bed,
and the storm peels the monsters from the cliffs
like a knife to an onion, and they’re for me,

me and the dog. Monsters: wide-toothed sea-dragons,
spiral-shells, the insects as long as an arm.
I’m not slow, whatever they say in London, I know
they’re reptiles, stone echoes of bones

formed in an ancient egg, lost crocodiles
lurking in balmy lakes. My tongue flint in my mouth.
A few shillings for a crisp spiral shell, for a skeleton,
enough to warm the house another winter.

I’m chipping free a coprolite
when the cliffs heave and relax, like a sighing horse,
and fresh shale spews. A landslide: the dog screaming,
I see my quick death, my narrow bones collapse

and join an ichthyosaur’s vertebra. The dog screams;
he stops screaming. My breath rusty, salt-licked, reminds me
I’m solid. The dog, the dog I’ve given to the stones,
as distant now as an ammonite in a swallowed sea.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Rosamund Taylor won the Mairtín Crawford Award for poetry at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017, has been twice shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for a Forward Prize for best single poem. Her work has recently appeared in Agenda, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, Channel and on LambdaLiterary.org. Her debut collection In Her Jaws in published by Banshee Press.