A Man's Well

by Carl Griffin

Other power countries built skyscrapers
and dipped their shoulders in outer space

but we drilled to the mantle of the earth
beyond the depth of an ocean trench.

To understand himself, a man must mine
his own heart. To understand the immense

complexities of his lifespan, he must dig down 
through layers of the organ he did not know existed.

First, the crust. Get beyond that, you reach
a whole new perspective. How hard we tried

with a drill pipe and rig, and torque 
and two decades, through fossils,

through scepticism and rock crystals.
Every year you age, the earth becomes hotter,

you can’t even dream of the heat to come,
the burns, the suffocation, the awareness

that survival is the highest privilege. 
Our eyebrows raised so high they came clean off,

the drill bits frazzled by the centimetre.
Until a man could fall for four minutes and not land.
 
Guard your heart or hell will surge up
until the pressing must be reeled back

to keep dark seven miles that barely cut the crust
with a metal hole cover and a dozen rusting bolts.

I was the last worker out of the drill room
but we will reassemble. We will understand.

​Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. In 2020, his book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain.