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Surtsey

 

It started with investigative birds;
The puffins, gulls and guillemots who wheeled
Above the infant isle and dropped their turds
Upon its cooling skin until a field
Of guano covered it. When spores of moss
And lichen drifted in on wind and tide, 
This fertilised them. Grasses spread across
The basalt plains as insects multiplied
And slugs and snails began to dot the ground. 
Now pipits, geese and plovers come to nest
And portly common seals to laze around.

This ecosystem is, I would suggest,
A pretty modest one, but it has grown,
In little more than fifty years, from stone.

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