Dig deep and delve

Go underground

beneath life’s leaflitter.

Explore stratigraphy.

Go below earth’s annual pulling curtain

where earwigs scamper

and woodlice curl and cower.

Go down down down

‘neath roots and worms and skulls and crowns

and roman glass and buried urns of bones,

patterned crockery and unexploded bombs.

Igneous, calcareous, metamorphic.

Caverns where pot holers no longer struggle.

Along the twisted seams of alchemy and miners’ dreams

and iguanodon and ammonite.

Tombs, cave-wombs and catacombs,

graves of the men who never even cried,

dismembered warriors and Harold’s eye.

Mesolithic arrow heads, golden torques curved like the moon.

Tears shed for a lost ring.

And the lost ring.

There, in darkness’ paradigm

dig dig and delve until

you find your heart.