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Poem Of The Week: Menwith Hill By Ian Parks

Menwith Hill

Up on the ridge and over by the gate
you’ll see them as the sun begins to rise –
women mostly, camped out overnight,

rain dripping from their red cagoules.
Where signs prohibit trespass
a makeshift township improvised

from tents and vans and sleeping bags
has drawn itself together round stick fires.
Under it association runs;

a sense of common purpose
to resist these unjust laws;
trees and stones and waterfalls

that find a way of happening despite
the guard dog barking at the fence;
the green-and-yellow soldiers with their guns.

Ian Parks’ poems are temporally recalcitrant: though formally measured – in this example the metrical arrangement only breaks as the observer pauses to consider a bucolic vision – the ever-present orbit of time leaks relentlessly into the poet’s sense of the present, systematically widening and disturbing the fabric of perception.

Where, elsewhere in his oeuvre, the spectres of historical iniquity, of class inequality, of racism, hove inexorably into Parks’ view, colouring his poems in the darker shades of the backward glance, here, in ‘Menwith Hill’, the makeshift tableau high on the A59 a few miles west of Harrogate is a seemingly futile condition of the theme that so animates protestors. The intelligence-gathering ‘listening’ station is one, hugely expensive, symptom of the wider spread of US power, and a further marker of military ‘unaccountability’.

Parks’ own vision is as cognizant of the tectonic undercurrents of history as that of Tony Harrison or Jeffrey Wainwright. Bespeaking an unusually acute awareness of division, of shifts of mood music towards the clamour for war, Park posits a Pantisocratic alternative of ‘trees and stones and waterfalls’, whose natural bounty are a metaphor for the embattled sense of purpose that unites the ‘township’ around ‘stick fires’. The distinctly Larkinian reversal of ‘Under it association runs’ perhaps imputes the power of common directed purpose against Larkin’s sense of ‘oblivion’.

Empowering though the pull of the natural world is when set against the blandishments of those who would destroy it, and worthy though the cause of those who stoically oppose the dehumanised ‘green and yellow soldiers with their guns’, time’s long treachery prevails: the protest is gone; the imposing golf balls remain.

‘Menwith Hill’ is taken from Ian Parks: Selected Poems 1983-2023, published by Calder Valley Poetry (2023)

More information here.

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