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Ian Parks

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The Flood

As simple as that the river burst its banks
and the fine thread that connects us broke,
spilling all the debris of the day downstream
to where the city rested on its weight.

Stranded at the station, I looked up:
the tower-blocks still occupied their share
of higher ground, dividing the horizon
with a strip of narrow light which clarified

the ache that absence brings.
I walked the empty platform to its end,
breathed in the sharp distracting air
and found the trunk of some forgotten tree

washed up there in a siding years ago.
Inconsequential, one of those things
that made me think our love’s like that
a smooth stone dropped into a silent pool

with you and I left waiting on the brink
to watch the ripples fade.  And when the waters
finally subside our future and our past come clear
in a residue of time; a legacy of rings.

Ian Parks was born in Mexborough in 1959.  From 1986-88 he was Writer in Residence at North Riding College, Scarborough, and went on to teach creative writing at the universities of Sheffield and Hull before taking up writing full-time in 1994.  He received a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1991.  His last collection, A Climb through Altered Landscapes, was published by Blackwater  in 1988;  Chartist Poetry 1838-48 is forthcoming from Edwin Mellen.  He was one of the Poetry Society’s New Poets in 1996 and was recently appointed by them as Poet in a Cornish Village.

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