Once a year I went underground,
to see what dad did, and to be brave.
After dressing up—hard hat angling a torch,
yellow overalls, oversized boots—the wait for the cage.
“Not the lift at John Orrs,” my father’s fellows joked
as it rattled up like a snake. Then the descent
into darkness, where flares torched us into the wet sinus
of the labyrinth and its precious artificial air,
to wires and cables crackling messages from the surface
and the ear-
cracking the centre of the earth,
where, as we children knew, miners would one day find
a bubbling volcano, China, or all the gold in the world.
The men below smiled shyly—
my mother said they missed their children—
but I was glad not to be the child
of an underground man,
eyes bloodshot, eardrums blown,
rattling in a cage, crawling through a cave,
while up above, only a curtain and a bed
and hot thick paste with gravy for food.
Orpheus and Eurydice confused me later:
somebody leaving, then turning back to look,
and somebody else going into the shuddering darkness.
The Gift of Experience
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Home Pond
Africa
In the Cage
Ingrid de Kok