Rooting through debris like a Victorian scavenger. Clearing a window on the foreshore of time. A glimpse of the past in a piece of old pottery: figures of rowers on broken blue Delft.
And not just the boatmen but some unknown person who ate bread and cheese from this long gone plate. Long gone, like the woman who once wore the glass beads displayed like bright sweets on a string long frayed.
Treasures discarded and washed back up again, long hidden beneath the grey, muddy sand, suddenly illuminated in the light of the morning, as you offer them up in your wet, muddy hands.
Joan Bailey
