Three Subterranean Poems

Here's a reading of three poems inspired by works of British artists in the 1940s, all of which explored subterranean themes:

https://youtu.be/oyFBOJ-oOwY

Shelter Women

Breathing roots, blanket-barked,
knot-mouthed slumberers, dead things
on the edge of sentience - gnarled ones
in the groined earth, grit-ingrained,
webbed with mycelium: we are Fates
and fated, sculptural, immovable,
hollowed out and whole - shelter women,
wombed and wombing. Waking, we glare
into ghosts of echoes, our sockets
blaring - the world above, a clatter
of blind unknowing. Buildings broken,
buses overturned, Blitz-dazed streets:
these things come to us as a dumb,
encumbered thrumming, a rattling
of plumbing. We are knitters, nursers,
blank standers, watchers of nothing,
white nocturnals warding off the morning.

Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941

She has been knitted out of wax, hands
unnaturally small: this Norn of worry, sitting
separate from the others, turned away
from the tunnel’s vortex. Her fingers pinch
each other; I think her nails are bitten. Instead
of eyes, she has absences, borrowing the tube stop’s
blackness. Her children are all evacuees:
that’s why she’s the only one who’s not
reclining. Incendiaries just ate her house,
her street’s all shrapnelled, every window
shattered, and the washing hangs in shreds,
but none of that matters: what haunts her is
the smell of trains, and how her daughters
wept, their nowheres scrawled on luggage-tags.

Man in a Cave

I hollowed it out with my own hands. The sandstone
was soft enough, so I only lost my nails. I’m amazed
at myself: how heedless I was to pain. The way above
is sunken, hedged with thorns and a needling grizzle
of gorse. After the chase, my trail smells more of fox
than any man’s; I too have learnt to squat watchful
over my spraint. Should anyone shine a light, I’ll hang
my head, so my pupils do not glow. See – my shoulders
have moulded to rock; my muscles might be sediments,
this flesh a brown compaction of trodden English soil.
If I emerged in daytime, birds would perch on me, worms
curl under my feet, and if it rained, I’d drizzle into loam,
but I’m safe here, and almost righteous. I’ll not come forth
to see what holocausts have raged, since I went to earth.

Poems by Giles Watson.