Pebbles On The Beach Poem by Mark Heathcote

The pebbles on the beach look smooth and round.
Being swung around slowly upended, turned one way and then another. Lifeless but full of promise; some plain, others speckled with hairline fractures as if about to crack open. Giving-birth-to-an-ancient fossil still living in the past with wings neatly folded and derived to outlast every carbolic soap ball left in the bathtub. They bake in the crematorium of the sun, you know, but nothing living is ever sadly seen again. But they all contained as much joy and sorrow as all of us. Kicking them over, I'm wondering what rocks will form from my dust and who, if anyone, shall care to inform them they meant nothing in the scheme of things. All these rocks, these many ammonite shapes, are just infertile dreams never opened or revealed by a visiting palaeontologist or poet who couldn't be bothered to sing. Rejoice at all the meaningless eccentricity of all these unaccountable sparkling bodily things.