Henry Moore, Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941

Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941

She has been knitted out of wax, hands
unnaturally small: this Norn of worry, sitting
separate from the others, turned away
from the tunnel’s vortex. Her fingers pinch
each other; I think her nails are bitten. Instead
of eyes, she has absences, borrowing the tunnel’s
blackness. Her children are all evacuees:

that’s why she’s the only one who’s not
reclining. Incendiaries just ate her house,
her street’s all shrapnelled, every window
shattered, and the washing hangs in shreds,
but none of that matters: what haunts her is
the smell of trains, and how her daughters
wept, their nowheres scrawled on luggage-tags.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2015. Inspired by a drawing by Henry Moore.