The Sedgwick Copyright © 2009 Rob Lock

Time to kill in Cambridge, and looking
for one that wasn’t The Fitzwilliam,
we came across The Sedgwick, containing
still, behind its Victorian façade,
the real thing: not pass-me-quick displays
but rows of minerals and fossils, case by case.

We started with crystals (won over by the gems,
defeated by the maths), wandered past
the Burgess Shale, then stopped to ponder
the richness of Shropshire’s Silurian Reefs,
recalling a walk on Wenlock Edge, shouting
above the noise of limestone gravel

extraction. Cambridgeshire coprolites
came as a surprise; the whales and sharks
of Norfolk more like old friends now.
Skirting the artist in residence, half way
through a still life of extinct bivalves, we left.
Now I find the image most securely

pinned is of the horizontal cases,
the ones devoted to obscure collectors,
the Thomas Fletchers, their brachiopods,
crinoids and nautiloids amassed by the thousand;
while cousins mapped each inch of the kingdom;
or recorded every English word, ever.