File:Sea Potatoes (3501147378).jpg
Sea_Potatoes_(3501147378).jpg (346 × 384 pixels, file size: 31 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
Captions
Captions
Summary
[edit]DescriptionSea Potatoes (3501147378).jpg |
Sea Potatoes They blow about like eggshells, where the sand Is dry and bleached as they are; others stained Brown as their namesakes, in the bilge of rotting kelp, The spines quite gone. The biggest are parchment-thin, Brittle beyond belief: a breath breaks them. Once, these were buried, deeper than human hearts, Great globs of sea-flesh, encased in shells that bristled With spatulate spines, each mouth a human orifice; Each back a hairy mound, like a human crotch. Lungless clumps of life beneath the sand. Now, with flesh gone out of them, and all the gummy Tube-feet withered, all the slime washed clean, The mucus dried, and the breathing tube That probed the sand and sought its end, all shrunk, They break like bloodless wafers in the sun. Source material: The sea-potato, or heart urchin, Echinocardium cordatum, is found in great numbers on the beaches of St. Martin’s, Isles of Scilly. It is a sand-burrowing sea urchin which has lost its radial symmetry, and has highly-adapted tube-feet which stick out from the shell, including some which extend up through a vertical, mucus-covered tube to the surface of the sand. When the animal dies, the soft part rots away like that of other sea urchins, but leaves behind a much more brittle shell. On windy days, these may be seen blowing about the beach. So brittle are these shells that my attempts to bring them home with me intact have nearly always ended in failure. I wrote this poem whilst I was still living on Scilly, and illustrated it with a real sea-potato before I had my camera, by using a computer-scanner. I'm not sure if I'm indulging in self-censorship or not, but the words were not originally "orifice" and "crotch"... |
Date | |
Source | Sea Potatoes |
Author | Giles Watson from Oxfordshire, England |
Licensing
[edit]![w:en:Creative Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/CC_some_rights_reserved.svg/90px-CC_some_rights_reserved.svg.png)
![attribution](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Cc-by_new_white.svg/24px-Cc-by_new_white.svg.png)
![share alike](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Cc-sa_white.svg/24px-Cc-sa_white.svg.png)
- You are free:
- to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
- to remix – to adapt the work
- Under the following conditions:
- attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.
![]() |
This image was originally posted to Flickr by Giles Watson's poetry and prose at https://flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/3501147378. It was reviewed on 13 May 2021 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0. |
13 May 2021
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
current | 18:29, 13 May 2021 | ![]() | 346 × 384 (31 KB) | Sentinel user (talk | contribs) | Transferred from Flickr via #flickr2commons |
You cannot overwrite this file.
File usage on Commons
There are no pages that use this file.