Gaping Ghyll Poem by Pete Crowther

Wet walls of rock enclose
a caverned space — earth’s womb
wherein we wander like
lost souls in exile
from our sunlit world above.
Here chthonic gods and goddesses
of darkness rule. There is no sky
but far away and high above,
faint daylight from the surface
filters through the cracks
and chimneys in the roof.
The only sound down here
is trickling water and the
crash and splash of three tall waterfalls
that fall so fast
through all the emptiness of this
great cavern underground. They say
it is so vast, a whole
cathedral could be lost
and swallowed up within its maw.
Before these towering walls
and buttresses of rock, as old
as time, I feel a need
to kneel, for never before,
in any cathedral made by man,
have I felt such a
terrible sense of religious awe.