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Poets and artists

Lapworth Museum Stillborn

You contradict your own being,
erase a shining path
the living would have you swim.

Had you left Ichthyosaur mom
to thrash for just a second
in that Jurassic broth

you may have proved some point,
if only that paddles of flesh
could let you be fast master
of under-water roll and pitch.
But you are un-sprung,
snapped within the fossil map,

your platter-set softening snout
and huge, spoon-cold eye
already extinct.

They can see these things,
palaeontologists,
the deadest amongst the dead,
but in this Edwardian cabinet ship
of creaking ancestral certainties
we are twice cheated,

twice preserved from each other:
you in your unlived sea-stone self,
both beyond this plate of glass.