Higher Ground - Nov 12 2025

 

Higher Ground

Nov 12 2025

It’s relentless

this lapping of the waves.

Over time

they inch up the shore

until the moment the waterline

strikes you as wrong,

glistening on the rocks

and darkening the sand

higher than it’s ever been.

Not like the tides

that cycle predictably;

and even the king tide

never licked at the edge of the lawn.

A rogue wave 

might once have gone higher

 — scouring the beach

like the hand of God reaching up —

but then 

as quickly receded

and we could breathe again. 

We are not the frog in boiling water.

We are not amphibians

breathing through our skin

and blinking dully,

because for years

we’ve see the ocean coming

and can’t so easily jump.

Which, I’m told, is what a frog really does

when staying put

means boiled alive.

I watch, as month-by-month

the waves ascend.

Watch

as they lap against the footings

then wet the base of the house, 

darkening the wood

of the board-and-batten walls.

And watch some more

as the water keeps rising,

until, in the fullness of time 

the house is nudged from its foundation

and floats away.

My home,

an unseaworthy vessel

that soon sinks beneath the waves,

leaving a jumble of waterlogged wood

rocking in the swell.

Until they, too, are swallowed-up

and only memories remain. 

The sand has washed away,

waves batter the rocks,

and the home I grew up in is lost.

There’s no holding back the sea,

and for now, we retreat;

a strategic withdrawal, we tell ourselves,

like troops

mustering their strength

to fight again.

Where all we can do is watch;

on edge,

the constant wariness

eating at our souls.

Hoping it will stop,

but ready to flee

the moment the battle is lost

to even higher ground.

I was struck by this photo, and the poem immediately started to write itself. Although the story in the poem is different than the one behind the picture, the cause is the same:  sea level rise as a result of global heating.

From the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/battling-the-sea-on-the-outer-banks), the first picture that appears in a “photo booth” piece under the headline:

BATTLING THE SEA ON THE OUTER BANKS

Daniel Pullen offers beautifully composed and striking images of the destruction that climate change has brought to his lifelong home.