Palaeontology Poem by Michael Cayley

For weeks now we’ve been picking at sandstone
in hard sun. Our hands are rough
from too much grit; our brains surfeited
on this scragend of hillside, its dry monotony
broken only by scant thorn.

There are better ways of enjoying summer
than this tour of Jurassic bits and pieces
jumbled by some undeciphered catastrophe,
buried in sand in an old climate
where continents danced in different formation
and the poles were warm.
We sip water
heated by the unrelenting blue
and groan at the thought of months over microscopes,
over chips of teeth that speak of a past
we can’t piece together, pre-human eras
which squeeze us to our true proportions.

Late afternoon, and we are back scrabbling
at the dry rockface. Our nails grow orange with dust,
our pencils scratch exact positions
of the minute fossils we add to the midden
for future study, when the falling sun
picks out new contours. Frantically
we chisel through the night to cradle a skull
the size of a two-year child, stagger
under a giant hipbone, certain at last
we have reached a world of first naming.