This hasn’t long been here. I wouldn’t know.
Two, three millennia? At most. Fewer?
To the west. Burnt Island was a small island,
not some heap of rocks at low tide, no more
than three centuries ago. Look at the maps.
And the spread of it would soon, as one went back,
be wider and much deeper. Think of earth
plumping the stones apart, bulking them high.
The archipelago is shrinking. Like the dirt
left after a working clothes wash, clinging
around the plughole of the sink, soon cleared
with a strong current from the tap running
against the outflow’s take by its volume.
That’s how this will be: centuries sluiced off
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