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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Emma-Jane Arkady

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Mine

You talk in sleep now -
they are rumbles I barely catch,
deep things, deep sounds till you roll over
when I stroke your neck.

You talk of it with such love,
and especially of the tunnels
whose length they measured
as something over much,
unsure of the limit.

I love your broad neck, breathe
slowly on the hairs in the night as you sleep,
catch the drops of sweat as a dew,
tip taste them with my tongue.

The lorries! the lorries! you screamed out one night,
and when I ask at breakfast you cannot recall the shout
but describe how you hear them first,
hear the deep oscillating thump,
long deep in the tunnels grinding up,
hauling up with tonnes of Cuprite and Blende;
you crouch in close to the cold stone
low, back and waiting,
waiting as the dark explodes into total brilliance as they roar
past then slams
dead to a pane of total total pitch.

You loved that; like sex you'd say,
but better.

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