In 2010 a challenge appeared in Mollusc World, the lighter magazine of the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland (its Journal being more technical).  A member wrote a poem about the boringness of limpets and asked for poetical rebuttals.  The response was hearteningly voluminous and diverse; all I think were entirely comical except mine, which follows.

Limpets

The tide lifts, the tide lifts, the tide lifts.

A tiny squelch: a body’s stretching forth.

Clinks: shell on shell; trickles: the gathering sea;

Reverberations from that other world

The underledge, where seaweed thickly trails.

A dogwhelk’s stalking: a strong foot that curves,

Head quests, mouth gently feels, paired tentacles

Droop forward over seeing broken crab.

The smell and sound jar up my rock to me.

Free in our upper world, our own clear patch,

We limpets scarcely need at first to move;

Our food’s our home – our seaweed as it’s sprouting –

One sense of weed and rock and tongue and me;

Soothing in rhythmic rasp my boney tongue

And tongues around me working busily.

I mark with juice my range, my rocky home

Which forms me: my sheltering shell

Exactly fits my roost; I nestle where

A big old limpet held the patch that’s mine

And the next patch.  An alongside fellow

Spawned with my birth, twin gametes flung to ocean,

Holds half the natural stronghold, half the slope.

We’ve fed.  We’ve taken all that this tide offers.

He’s settled back.  He’s had more weed than me.

Relaxed, he munches at his shallow bedplace.

I slowly edge, I creep behind, I wedge beneath him

My shell, I rock, I rock, I rock, I heave.

Frightened he tightens.  He’ll do the same to me now

Another tide.  We’ve grown to battle royally.

                                 ***

“Earth takes all.  Water makes all new.”

So a Polish gardener once translated.

I learned the second young, away from home,

Amazed at the vast sea, its upshrugged bounty,

Heap upon heap, fresh and fresh again.

Then after delving as into autumn leaves

I set myself to pick a very best,

Biggest, tallest, prettiest, most distorted,

At every tide bewilderment of choice.

Some are lined up just as I arranged them

When first I knew their names: flat winkles, dogwhelks,

Mussels, cockles.  The common limpets were

The most touched, so rough outside, so smooth within.

Their sandy cornets matched the nibbled wafers

Of sunny childhood; inside, matching rain days.

I turn the shells with thoughts of later childhood,

The lifelong puzzle why some shapes can please,

And even simple limpets show this too:

Humped shoulders, clumsy; others seeming made

Of linked fans flatly spread; some a rectangle

With sides in golden section short to long.

I think of teaching-time: when asked to rank shells

Each child chose a different rationale,

And each was valid; also, they loved to draw them,

At first resisting white chalk on grey paper,

But seeing as I saw the plainest shells

Growing to strangest draws most like the model

And most like each child too, together thought of.

Time’s marked by rearrangement: books then led me

On shore and in assembling of the trays:

The Halcyon, the Blue-Rayed, the Kingfisher,

That even now I can’t resist to gather,

 The Tortoiseshell, sometimes the northern prize

Of shell sand; the finely fretted Keyhole,

And like it, the dainty Slit-Margin limpet,

Cross-coffered like a neo-classic ceiling;

The smothering, chain-mating, alien Slipper –

New there’s one shell, one mollusc I don’t care for –

Coarse, dirty-pink Crepidula fornicata;

Chinaman’s Hat, as quirky as its name;

Records of primitive chitons, odd, unsea-like:

The limpet tray swelled in variety.

The commonest molluscs all may displayed

The equal denizens of a collection,

And commoner limpets subtly can divide:

Vulgata, aspera, intermedia or depressa,

Dog Latin chanted and with careful hand

Set underneath them like a stalking whelk.

Within, colouring that’s almost unattractive:

Pale greys, pale greens, pale yellows, bluish white,

Some shot with orange, rusty red or rich slate blue –

A colour scheme that’s off the edge of obvious

Sets up a salty tingle in the taste –

And shifting occlusions show

Brightest depths of cloudy daytime skies

Or milkier skies without a hint of sun,

Echoing the British days when they were gathered.

From depths of layering wells clearest freshness

Still gleaming after many years in trays.

Limpets by R.S. Holt, 2010