Ian Parks
Poems from 'The Cage' by Ian Parks
The Cage
My father relinquished
his claim on the light.
At sixteen he went down
to work the seams.
The cage was lowered
on a rusted thread;
the men were crowded in
behind steel bars.
And then began
to drop into the dark -
a sharp descent
that took the breath away
which afterwards he heard
in his worst dreams.
Through me his dreams persist.
Son follows father
in the way of things
and so I come belatedly
to where his torch bobs
somewhere underground.
A smile breaks
when he touches me;
an indigo coal scar
tattoos his wrist.
Orgreave
Like this at Wakefield, Towton, Marston Moor
or like any place where men have come together
to settle a dispute by force of arms:
helmets in the sunlight, push of pike,
a trampling down by horses in the mire.
Except this was high summer
and the middle of the strike,
the shields not steel but perspex
driving back the miners
to their wavering picket line;
my father bringing home a bloody nose
to show he’d not been slacking in the fight.
The Glass Head
Something about it made me think of death:
not quite in general but my own -
quite pure transparent, open to the light,
blocking the entrance where all thought begins
and yet accepting into it the world of shapes
and things - there where the long room narrows
into night.
Once it was a molten
white-hot mass; before that grains of sand,
a bleb where air trapped inside the mould;
and now it’s waiting to return to its former state
of atoms and dust; unseen and indivisible,
the Heraclitean fire of flux and strife.
At either side, the moment stands on guard
until the pressure shatters it.
So when I shift its weight from hand to hand,
stare through it and beyond it to the stars,
I’m trying to work out a different fate,
remind myself of who I am by looking long and hard
at death - not death in general but my own -
an event outside the moment, outside life.
• 'The Cage' is an A5 (148mm x 210mm) publication.
• 29 pages in total.
• Perfect bound with paperback cover.
• The Cage is due for publication in June 2008.