The Shaft

The shaft seemed like a place of sacrifice:

	You climbed where spoil heaps from the hill

Spilled out into a wood, the slate

	Tinkling underfoot like shards, and then

You bent to enter: a passageway:

	Cervix of stone: the tick of waterdrops,

A clear clepsydra: and squeezing through

	Emerged into cathedral space, held-up

By a single rochsheaf, a gerbe

	Buttressing-back the roof. The shaft

Opened beneath it, all its levels

	Lost in a hundred feet of water.

Those miners—dust, beards, mattocks—

	They photographed seventy years ago,

Might well have gone to ground here, pharoahs

	Awaiting excavation, their drowned equipment

Laid-out beside them. All you could see

	Was rock reflections tunneling the floor

That water covered, a vertical unfathomed,

	A vertigo that dropped through centuries

To the first who broke into these fells:

	The shaft was not a place to stare into

Or not for long: the adit you entered by

	Filtered a leaf-light, a phosphorescence,

Doubled by water to a tremulous fire,

	And signalling you back to the moist door

Into whose darkness you had turned aside

	Out of the sun of an unfinished summer.