Caverns - a reading (on YouTube)
Sealed behind steel doors and
Rusty gates with cast-iron locks,
An ancient landscape leeches from the surface
Like some madman’s forgotten dream.
While the ranger regales us with tales
Of the Civilian Conservation Corps,
Shadows conceal the sentinels
Of deeper chthonic creatures.
We wend our way through goblin crawls,
Peering up suspiring chimneys,
Squeezing past primeval breeding dens,
On a path chiseled smooth by many hobnailed feet.
Galleries give way to sacred chambers,
Columns flank a flowstone cathedral,
Moated by descending rimpools,
The blackest mirrors of our souls.
Ribbons of water,
Ribbons of rock,
Ribbons of raw pigment,
Trickle down its twilight walls,
Painted ashen in calcite white,
Burnt iron umber,
Sooty black manganese,
Portents of the dragon’s ire.
Hoarfrost quartz encrusts his vaulted ceiling,
Precious diamonds ripe for tiny fingers,
While pilfering, wingless fairies
Lurk behind each dripstone drapery.
With pickaxes and sharpened shovels,
These mole-eyed miners ambush
His moonless darkness
With two-candlepower lamps.
We are reborn to renewed possibilities
After defeating the black beast within.
Dazzled by the dappled sunlight,
We stumble on beneath a verdant sky.
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
