Minotaur Poem by Giles Watson

“Sapper John Lane, from Staffordshire,
father of four, reporting for duty, Sir.
Married man. Occupation: miner.
I’m here to kill the Minotaur.”

We have five thousand, nine hundred
pounds of charge down here, hoarded
up in a dead-end. I am one in twenty-
five thousand, serving a cold country.
We have dug a labyrinth that winds
three hundred miles. We make new worlds,
sunless as Hades, raftered for a stoop-
bodied race who see by candle-stump
and lantern, scrawling grimed signatures
on walls of hewn stone, our muscled statures
thumb-squat, stunted. Our masters –
or maybe theirs – made the Minotaur
while we were mining, out of a horned
coupling of flesh and iron: shook the hand
of Mammon, and agreed to murderous war.
We’re eighty feet underground. Here’s where
to lay the fuse. Trail it along this way,
between your legs. Still. Listen. Wait.

Hear him moving? That distant clanking
is the steel-clad tattoo of his hell-cloven
hooves: a muffled scrabble, a mutter
of voices – German. He is made of miners
the same as you: a vast conglomeration
of industrial flesh. His every motion
mirrors yours, and when the wall
caves in, you see him, and the wailing
snort that issues from his gasmasked
nostrils is your own. A grey mist
descends – rock dust – and haloed
in it, his pick, upraised: his old
hallowed horns ready for a goring.

A candle sears his glowering
eyes: he lowers it to his fuse,
and cowering on all fours
hunkers under the lode.

His charge and yours explode.