Jemma Borg
Lookout over Happy Valley
It was nearby, among skulls of rain-carved sand,
within the argillaceous strata and mud,
among exposed quartz and the Weald’s crusting
of siltstone honeycomb –
the thawing and freezing horizon
of southern England where groundwater seeps
at the boundary of clay and sand, and sometimes
that boundary slips – that the written statement
of Iguanodon was found:
the contorted dead-end of its bones.
Darkness is coming up from the valley.
The lookout continues to break away
from the world, and yet is held fast.
Somewhere, the old quarries are resonating with rain.
Somewhere, the percolating rain is forced to surface.
And the animal I am is leaping.