East of Zero
East gets less each year. The curse of stupidity,
like Cnut forbidding high tide.
We protect vital assets scourging softer land south
to its fate in the grey North Sea.
East Riding—it marks final landfall
before the Greenwich meridian touches The North Pole.
Long-shore drift erodes Easington, Kilnsea,
ground to sediment deposited at Spurn.
Earth is scooped away by the Holderness Ord,
a wyrm of water uncoiling, twisting, making land sea again.
Zero is imagined–a construct for longitude.
In one hundred years nothing will be east of here
and our house, twelve miles from the coast,
will become littoral.
a great and chilling poem connecting local and global fears. Paul Sutherland
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