The title tells us who is speaking: someone displaced by a changing climate, grieving a home that now lies underwater. The opening line, "I miss my own piece of ground / under the sea," states the loss plainly, and the rest of the poem circles around it in short, broken fragments that feel like thoughts surfacing one at a time.
The speaker seems adrift, and the imagery suggests a loss of more than land. The mind is "like a harp / and no hand to suit it," an instrument with nobody to play it. Religion appears only as a "thin cross" and a vague possible call, and the speaker doesn't sound convinced by it. Instead they ask whether death and despair will rule them or merely "temper" them, the way fire tempers metal.
By the end, the speaker accepts that there is a time to fall and a time to age, and imagines lying down "with the crows / in my hindered land." The mood is quiet, weary and bleak, though not hysterical. It reads like grief that has settled into resignation.