There’s a giftshop
and a café—buses parked close
to the limestone mouth.
Air gusts out,
cool—the crowd
breaks and eddies,
he moves with the current,
is borne
toward the dark—turns
for one look back:
She averts her face,
has no coin to buy passage
under the earth.
(c) Helen Lowe
Illustration showing Niels Klim with the tree-people of Potu, from the 1845 English edition of Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground.
Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and a 2012 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. She emerged onto the NZ poetry scene in 2003 as an inaugural Robbie Burns Award winner and has since had over fifty poems published and anthologized, both in NZ and overseas. The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in her The Wall of Night series, was published internationally in April, and she recently won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012 for the first-in-series, The Heir of Night. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is a regular Tuesday Poem contributor. You can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we
Thank you to Helen for permission to use this poem. There is no author’s comment. I chose the above illustration because that is how the poem spoke to me…but you must draw your own conclusions.
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