An
Erratic This glacial boulder
weighs nearly a ton.
Its parent group is Cumberland volcanic.
After aeons
it was moved by sheet ice
to the Mersey basin. In 1908
the City Engineer
placed it here
in front of Wavertree District Library,
behind these black
railings, a ‘meteorite’
to generations of schoolchildren since.
Some still
run their fingers round its surface
but its work here is done: any magnetic
properties have dimmed with age, and so
it essays now in scruple and endurance.
Somewhere inside the lending library
you’ll find it mentioned by George Harrison
in his book I Me Mine (where he also
praises the quality of Liverpool
water,
as fine as any he’d known for washing hair,
so altering the course
of popular culture).
from The
Ice Age
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