Eggenburg White

A friend of mine, a cartographer, explained it to me like this. If you drew a circle a couple of inches in diameter with a pencil, the thickness of the pencil line would equate to the thickness of the Earth's surface. My friend's illustration tells me that the Earth's crust which we all like to think of as firm and fixed beneath our feet is in fact a thin and fragile thing - not much more than the skin of an apple.

The following poem first appeared in the poetry journal iota and later in the award winning collection Genteel Messages published by Poetry Monthly Press (sadly now defunct) in 2008. It's here today because it relates in a way to the item below this.

Today the Pannonia Plain covers parts of Austria, Hungary, Moravia etc.. It was at one time the floor of a great ocean reaching all the way to the Black Sea.

The city of Vienna, which is only about 250 miles as the proverbial crow flies from the mountains in the picture below, would have been situated (in today's location) on the western shore of the Pannonia Sea if the city had existed then, rather than being in the centre of the continent called Europe where it is found today. The world is a planet under construction.

Near Eggenburg you can find sharks' teeth and other similar debris loosely packed in soft white stone just a few inches under the grass under your feet or clearly visible in a small cliff running along the side of a country lane or a stream. You can easily winkle these things out of the stone with your fingers.

Similar scenes can be found all over the planet.

Eggenburg White

Detritus laid down in the shallows

of the long-dead sea makes the bed

fishy carcasses

spiky sea urchins

cracked seashells

sharks' teeth

are once more rendered workable

sandwich-squashed

in layered limestone

it's the sought after stone

for the carvers of idols

and the cutters of milestones.

And yet -

the dusty clinks and taps

of the workaday chisels

and the heavy groans

of the heave-ho! pushcarts

lugging the loads

to the ends of the tracks

are more than a wave away

from the world where the tide has turned

and is green.

Old blocks now rest

on beds of camomile

as cogs and handles rust

entangled and rosehipped in brambles

where heavy elders

loaded with drooping fruit

sigh and droop

over an old sea's bed

abandoned

these wine-drenched

waterline

slopes

columns of white-eyed men

glare all ways

into the yawning skies

and the infinite tides and times.

_____

gw2008,2011