A Geonaut Supreme

The moles of Lichfield are numerous and industrious, and evidence of their activities, in the form of lines of molehills, is easily found. These doughty tunnellers are of course Mercian moles, descendants of the mole that shoulders the clogged wheel in Hymn IV of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns –  

I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots
and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my
time: where the mole

shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where
dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the
long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.

By chance – actually not by chance, as I'd been impressed by a poem of hers that Patrick Kurp quoted recently – I found this very fine mole poem by the American poet Deborah Warren, a  cleverly rhymed sonnet that breaks, unusually, at line seven, when it moves from below the ground into  the air – 

 Mole

Earth is his occupation, and the moleworks the turf in his native breaststroke, swimminghallways into the sod—a geonautsupreme, and connoisseur of worms; I’ve heard himbreaking roots an inch beneath my soleand seen how the subterranean specialistcarves out for himself a single, simple role.I envy the expertise he brings to bearon dirt, the narrow office he was given;as for me, my habitat is thought,where I grope and sweat and scrabble out a living,forced to prove—up here in a windy lairas invisible as the mole’s—that there existsan animal who can dig a hole in air.
I still remember the first time I found a dead mole, how perfect its velvet coat was, and how out of place the poor creature, with its excavator claws and tiny eyes, looked above ground. Here is another very fine mole poem, Andrew Young's  'A Dead Mole' – 
        Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?