I went back to a beach today
that I swam at almost daily 
for 10 years.

So I know it fairly well.
But I hadn’t been there much
for the last 20 years
or so.

I was shocked today
to see much of it
had washed away.
A large cliff face greeted me 
almost at the end of the steps.

People were hunkered up
against a fenceline
on the sand.

I looked down to the teahouse
and the water was lapping
at the concrete stairs.

The tide was only half way
between high and low,
and it was rising.

Gradually, slowly,
the Earth is being eaten away.

But where do things go 
when they disappear,
when they’re ‘extinct’?

Something new is growing, though,
in the midst of this.

It grows in the Earth’s
invisible foundations,
and in our own.

And it will meet there
all those old friends
we might otherwise 
have lost.