Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Shelter Women
Picture: Shelter Drawing, by Henry Moore, 1940.
Shelter Women
Breathing roots, blanket-barked,
knot-mouthed slumberers, dead things
on the edge of sentience - gnarled ones
in the groined earth, grit-ingrained,
webbed with mycelium: we are Fates
and fated, sculptural, immovable,
hollowed out and whole - shelter women,
wombed and wombing. Waking, we glare
into ghosts of echoes, our sockets
blaring - the world above, a clatter
of blind unknowing. Buildings broken,
buses overturned, Blitz-dazed streets:
these things come to us as a dumb,
encumbered thrumming, a rattling
of plumbing. We are knitters, nursers,
blank standers, watchers of nothing,
white nocturnals warding off the morning.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Inspired by Henry Moore's 'Shelter Drawings', 1940.
Shelter Women
Picture: Shelter Drawing, by Henry Moore, 1940.
Shelter Women
Breathing roots, blanket-barked,
knot-mouthed slumberers, dead things
on the edge of sentience - gnarled ones
in the groined earth, grit-ingrained,
webbed with mycelium: we are Fates
and fated, sculptural, immovable,
hollowed out and whole - shelter women,
wombed and wombing. Waking, we glare
into ghosts of echoes, our sockets
blaring - the world above, a clatter
of blind unknowing. Buildings broken,
buses overturned, Blitz-dazed streets:
these things come to us as a dumb,
encumbered thrumming, a rattling
of plumbing. We are knitters, nursers,
blank standers, watchers of nothing,
white nocturnals warding off the morning.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Inspired by Henry Moore's 'Shelter Drawings', 1940.