It’s National Poetry Day! The Talk Welly crew are celebrating with this evocative piece about future, all-consuming sea level rise…

Hear Tim Jones and others at Wellington City Library today!

 

The Last Days of the Coastal Property Boom

 

Lights on, curtains drawn, ‘Ode to Joy’

turned up loud to drown the pounding sea —

habits of prosperity surviving awareness of its end.

 

But uncurtained morning shows the ocean

nearer by a day, the last remaining dune

barely a memory of marram grass and halophytes.

 

High tide casts driftwood to the bottom step,

spume splits paint flakes from seaward-facing walls,

decking warps and peels as foundations wash away.

 

This was prime property when they saw it first,

the retirees’ dream of a quiet cottage, snug

between tarmac’s end and the start of the dunes.

 

They saw the waves and wondered, paced

the reassuring distance from high tide to front gate.

The LIM report should have warned them  

 

but lawyers hired by those with most value to lose

had overturned the Council’s plans

and the LIM report said nothing.

 

The estate agent’s hectic glibness, the bank’s eagerness to lend,

lulled their fears to a vague and distant concern.

They found an insurer who would cover them,

 

cocooned themselves in pensions and furnishings,

paid no attention as Greenland and West Antarctica

spritzed meltwater into the rising sea.

 

That was the stuff of one-minute world news roundups,

helicopter shots of nameless, faceless, drowning refugees

in lands a reassuring hemisphere away.

 

Until the coastal defences failed, until first-world cities

were sent scrambling backwards from the beaches,

a planet-wide Dunkirk unfolding in reverse.

 

Now the children call them daily, desperate

for them to make the move inland. Now the house

rises and falls to the rhythm of the tide.

 

Now the last of their furniture vanishes,

hand-carried down the narrow strip of land

to the sympathetic darkness of the moving van.

 

They emerge defeated, encircled by cameras,

the human-interest story of the moment,

the last of this rich coastline’s climate refugees.

 

The van departs for the hinterland, where tent towns

sprawl cold across a wind-assailed plateau.

The coast reverts to sea wrack and bird call.

 

Waves take all but their house’s foundations, latest

and most miniature of reefs. What remains

is memory, that widest, all-consuming sea.

 

From Tim Jones’s latest poetry collection New Sea Land (Mākaro Press, 2016)

 

Cover picture CC by Arno Gasteiger

Further images and article NZ Geo’s Three Feet High and Rising

 

 

 

Tags: adaptation, climate change, poetry, sea level rise, Wellington City