Corinna Board

Broken pebbles

After Andy Goldsworthy

A man carefully splits pebbles in two. The sound of cracked stone,
over and over. Thirty-four times. More, as there must have been
failure—there is always failure. Crack, crack, crack. Measured with
the naked eye, a decreasing spiral of broken pebbles. The shadow line
of emptiness between the halves—a winding road to nowhere. Pebbles
like open mouths, scratched with teeth, the hunger of broken things.
On Lyme Regis beach, we search for fossils all afternoon. In the end, I
buy a small ammonite from the local shop. The woman calls them
snakestones, which pleases me. I carry it around like a talisman and
tell everyone I found it, but the stone knows I’m lying and slips out of
my pocket in disapproval.

Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. She particularly enjoys exploring our connection to the more-than-human. Her work has appeared in various journals, most recently in Magma 90: Grassroots and Poetry News.

Corinna wrote the following about her poem:

I was looking through some of my sister’s old art books when I came across one about Andy Goldsworthy. I was immediately drawn to his ephemeral creations made from natural materials and began to write about them. As I did this, memories of my own surfaced and inevitably made their way into the poems. ‘Broken Pebbles’ was inspired by a photo of pebbles arranged in a spiral, like an ammonite, and is recounted by a speaker who may or may not be totally reliable!