We trawl for the talismans of time-travel 

along pewter shores and craggy pools   

Our six-year-old selves caught 

in bowls of brine, mirrors to ripple  

our reflections outwards 

Your red wellies a sudden thrill  

against the lash of rock, salted in mist 

your edges beginning to soften 

 

But you are too far out   

Ever searching for the ridged whorls 

of ancestry. The present haunting and hunting 

the past. There was always a why 

in your mouth back then 

We dream of soothing the indentations - 

reading the braille of the Jurassic.  Lineage we can trace 

to the curve of our spines, cochlear, the guppy entities 

we were 

in our unknown mother’s caul. The ache to find the origins 

so raw in our bones. But you are too far out 

when you call - Come! I’ve found one -  

a benediction bouncing through 

the cloying haze 

 

I see you, twenty years out  

a diminutive hologram projected 

onto the billowed canvas of mist stitching sea and sky 

together. Your tubby fingers clasp  

the shale-stored nostalgia of a creature, held  

high but you are too far out. I watch you  

blurring into insubstantiality, a chalky outline clasping the beginning 

of an answer. But you were too far out. I could only watch  

you dissolve. The we becoming I. Your red wellies -  

fossilised ghosts in my memory