Brought here by ice-age glaciers
And held in Boulder Clay
Across an ache of time
Twelve thousand years
First passed
Before you dropped
Like fruit to shore
When rain and winter tide released
Its crop of marbled stone
More precious than indigenous
Cretaceous chalk
They call you all ‘erratic’
A Glacial Till
Of errant wandering
That brought you here from
Scotland, Scandinavia
And English mountain peaks
Your names: Red Granite
Sandstone, Garnet Schist
White-Vein of Quartz
Rhomb Porphyry, Jasper
Lakeside Brockram
Each word sings out
Its history and heft
And, once you fell to land,
Across so many ages
You lay yourselves steadfast
Shoring-up Spurn’s shapely curve
Strong sitting, firm, against the wash
Absorbing shock and shift from
High tide’s tonnage
When water’s force rammed hard
In beating and berating blows
Against the lonely spindle coast
But then a change was beached
As people looked to harvest what they thought
Was simply theirs to crop
And ships, like Billy Foster’s sloop the Paradise,
High-hauled wet gravel from the shore
Across the Warren’s swoop from Greedy Gut
Ship down, tide low: each vessel’s hefty hold
Gorged deep on ossified and stony feed
Gut bursting. Gannet full.
Again and again
These Cadgers came
And for a penny hauled their fill
Of rock laid down
By time, by ice, by snow
Until today, long gone,
With any profits made too quickly spent,
That prehistoric fossil ore
Can do no more to help the land
Because an absent rock
Can not in any measure stop
The ever-hungry sea.
