Michael Rosen's Coldham's Common Poem

Poem devised collaboratively with Helen Weinstein who briefed Michael Rosen about the area and the local history & you can find the resources for parents and teachers about Coldham's Common, Coprolite mining and more on our website http://www.creatingmycambridge.com/songs-creative/resources/local-history-topics

MICHAEL ROSEN'S COLDHAM'S COMMON POEM The years pass and the grass grows, the grass grows over the years disappear...

Underground clues are found. Listen! And we can hear across a hundred million years...

The sound of the sea where now there’s a tree; giant lizards in the sky wide wings take them high swooping on fish in the waves gliding over rocks and caves flapping and stopping leaving their droppings for millions of years right here, just here.

The years pass and the grass grows, the grass grows over the years disappear.

What were droppings and bone turn to stone deep down, day and night silent, slow, out of sight vast beyond measure a secret treasure deep in the ground waiting to be found.

Up above people come and go their pigs and cows moving slow free to graze upon the ground until a Lord puts fences round: nowhere for the pigs and cows, and with the people starving now one Jack o’ the Style leads a revolt with a hundred others they call a halt break the fences and burst back through with pigs and cows, their hens and ewes.

The years pass and the grass grows, the grass grows over the years disappear.

One John Ball from Barnwell way beneath the grass, said there lay some sort o’ magical stuff the which - if ye had enough, mixed it right, made it just so, it’d make any plant grow and in a matter of just a few years thousands came and dug right here.

Very few knew that all the while they were free to do so, ‘cos of Jack o’ the Style very few knew that the reason why was down to lizards in the sky for millions of years, leaving behind what many years later, others would find.

The years pass and the grass grows, the grass grows over the years disappear and here we are: we stand right here.