Six Poems

A Hole in the World
It'd be there, staring back,
should I so much as glance down
between the tip heaps and coke ovens -
a gash in the longwall face
and brooding empty barrows, so much
dark in the shifts of light.

And there it was, plumbing
the earth's cracked crust, starry-eyed.
Silence was so much damp breath
hugging the surge tanks, sun
and slow change, all the massed
dazzlements of hard carbon.

Fear of it, my slabby medium.
I wrestled with strange
news, on the brink of understanding
...