On Day 655 of the daily poems our poet Derek Adams finds Buried Treasure becoming unburied at the eroding cliff of the Naze – that promontory at the eastern end of NE Essex.
The hard stuff
Six pieces of wood,
that some ancient alchemy
has turned to iron pyrites.
One fifty million year old tooth, sharp
as the day it dropped from a shark.
One Neptunea contraria,
the red crag’s anti-clockwise whelk,
turning back through two million years.
I’ve been collecting at the Naze,
that great grey and yellow wave
sculpted by the wind, the sea, the rain:
that graphs changing climes
each slip and slide of tide and time
reveals the hard stuff that remains.
Derek Adams
First published in Envoi 152, 2009