Black Smoker Poem by Dorothy Featherstone Porter

trench
it's your grandfather's word
not yours

it means the smell
of entrails in mud

it means war.

trench
you want to tell his ghost
the news

trench
means life,
life wriggling
like a grilled maggot
from a scorching nowhere.


You try and describe
a friendly hell
in an ocean trench
in loving reach
of an oozing vent
where hot water shocks
into cold

and black smokers
streaming locks of tube worms
grow.

It makes you wonder,
you ask your grandfather,
about the fertility
of other hells -

the chattering pregnancy
in every misery.