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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.