I found it on the corner of the cottage.
Embedded in the warm ironstone, a fossil.
It must date from the Cretaceous age.
At least 65 million years old, time’s apostle.

The cottage has seen so much in two hundred years.
But that span is but a passing teardrop.
What is the importance of our tears?
In the context of those 65 million years since the fossil swam nonstop.

For once it swam past some tropical sea’s strand.
With passing dinosaurs on the beach.
Now in a peaceful country garden it stands in mortal land.
A sentinel to life’s short span us to teach.

Can we not now understand now our body’s fate in death.
One day to be embedded in some unseeing stone, a million years without breath.