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Poetry

The Deep

by George Hopewell

Down here is a cageless world
murk, dark
and an underfog.
We slide

until our welds crack.
It was Kant who turned this bathysphere
inside out.
Those fish, he said, are inside
not out. So we pretend,
watch fish bones descend
through sea thick as molten glass
cushion onto silt without a sound.

Down to the still,
where, with slack cables
we test the thrill of weightlessness
lure, like anglerfish
distant candles
shivering on thin batteries.

We learn
but, on our return
find laughter.
The flotilla’s having fun
windsurfing, water-skiing
gibing at us.

This is the risk
that we who sink
cannot find the surface
and all these coloured sails
cannot
reel us up.

George Hopewell studied philosophy at Oxford University and has always enjoyed using it creatively and with humour, publishing poems, short stories, articles and novels, the latest of which explores the weirdness of mind.