"the world that you inhabit has not yet been created"

Shells

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet
or murex, cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

KATHELEEN RAINE

you, dear reader, will remember when I used the inspiration gained from the Hepworth Museum to research her involvement with the poet Raine, a book of whose I had had since my teens, how I tracked down first editions of two of Raine's books, how I rebound two volumes for entry into a bookbinding exhibition I'd been invited to show work at after winning that prize, how I overpriced them so ridicuously that noone would buy them as I wanted to keep them, they didn't sell and I kept them; they are on the shelf to my left as I sit typing this. . .
.
. . .memories from a lost past
.

can a past ever be lost if you have memories?
.
"the world that you inhabit has not yet been created" might be a beautiful turn of phrase but it doesn't work for me - I live in a world of my own creation