On Watch at Porthcurno Cable Office

I touch with awe this polished terminal of brass For when I touch it I am touching Spain And islands in the far Atlantic wastes. Their link with home, my home, this spiders-line Fragile, yet spanning depths of the abyss Where monstrous fish with gaping mouths do glide Silent, unseeing, in the fearful deep.

And o'er the coral strand of distant isles Across the sparkling shallows and the sun-washed reefs This one thin strand of insulated copper, Starts from my fingertips This lacquered yellow terminal of brass.

I press the cable key but once A tiny current flows But long before I draw another breath, or blink It's journey's done. PK, Ascension, St Helena, and the Cape Ten thousand miles of wire and back again Mirrors swing in distant darkened rooms And in some far off land they know at once "Porthcurno's on the line again".

Sometimes a cable dies As earthquakes stir the deep foundations of the sea Or sharks in shallow waters bite Or worms bore tunnels in the cables core Or human error reaps its own reward of failure.

Then sit and watch an endless line of ink Drawn by pens of glass on paper slip Waiting, searching, looking for a ship Whose presence will be shown to aching eyes By wavers on that pen-drawn line of ink Pulses of the earth's own making, as the cable moves Grasped by the grapnels probing fangs And hoisted to the surface of the sea Through earths magnetism To the ship, for mending.

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