Underground

Underground

No light gets beneath the crust

—a life of sedimentary blackness.

I lay there in the earth

for a decade plus listening

to small sounds, at first with

one much the same as another,

till across the course of many years

I learnt to differentiate greys.

An eyeless worm makes their way

through the dirt with a wake

that’s different to a beetle

that’s different to a mole. An ant

exists in concert and transmits

an orchestra of tiny tremors.

Even the presence of Jurassic

skeletal remains give a pale hum

if you know what to listen for.

I’d learned what I could

of the dark. It was time

to surface, to punch up

through the soil into daylight

like the green shoot of a root vegetable

ready now to see it all.