Each morning the waves coughed up a ransom of sand-dollars.
We laughed, scorning the very notion of ransom;
we built the dunes and sea-walls higher.
The sea in its grief dashed madly against the rocks at Wakefield quay;
it sulked at us from beyond the saltmarsh.

We call it reclamation;
re-education would be closer. A hundred years
and half a million pounds, it cost, but in time,
the daughter of the sea learned to love her captors.

The sea will never give up though.
It paces up and down Tasman Bay, broadcasting loss in the voices of gulls.
It waits for the day we pack up and ship out,
leaving a used-up Nelson to creep back to her mother.