Today, the Kimberley Mine is surrounded by a high wire fence. The fence has been there ever since late in the last century, when a man committed suicide by throwing himself into the crater. The city authorities were never able to retrieve his body, and some people say that every now and then it rises to the surface and floats about. – EMILY HAHN
At Kimberley the sundered clay
Gives up in fee, to the broad light,
This recompense for light held prey
In the strait crystal; gives up, white
With time, the crystal’s parallel:
Clay straitened in a perfect shell –
Clay that, grown merely isolate
In death, was once particular;
In its distinction, obdurate.
This mine returns us what we are;
The suicide, the diamond,
They are ourselves. We are the bond
In whom unite specific fire
And its obscuring earth; for whom
Can serve neither a common pyre
Nor the compound clay of the tomb.
For severed elements, this rite:
Earth out of earth, earth come to light.
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