Faultline

Outlines of waves preserved from the last tide
Etched out in microplastic.
Echoes of energy spent
Sucked in and out on the backwash;
Our past, present and future
Held shattered in the palm of a hand.
At our feet, rounded rocks mirror wave-swirls
Rolled by rivers, smoothed by relentless tides
Separated by millennia yet heaped together here;
One foot on the Devonian, another on the Triassic,
I’m standing on the Anthropocene,
On time, metamorphosed.
You smile, bored,
Having heard it all before;
And the cracks forming between us
Split just that little bit further.

-Larissa Reid

Bios And Links

-Larissa Reid

A freelance science writer by trade, Larissa has written poetry and prose regularly since 2016. Notable publications include Northwords Now, Silk & Smoke, Green Ink Poetry, Fenacular, Black Bough Poetry Anthologies, and the Beyond the Swelkie Anthology. She had a poem shortlisted for the Janet Coats Memorial Prize 2020. Larissa is intrigued by visible and invisible boundary lines in landscapes geological faultlines, myth and reality, edge-lines of land and sea. Based on Scotland’s east coast, she balances her writing life with bringing up her daughters. Larissa is a founder member of the Edinburgh-based writing group, Twisted::Colon.