Henry Moore the modernist sculptor
lived a mile from my front door.
Daily, he worked with hammer and chisel defamiliarising objects,
mainly humans, who would recline in casts of bronze.
What Moore didn't know
was that below him,
again about a mile away,
worked another artist
with similar tools carving carbon 14
into black caverns
at an astonishing rate.
This was my dad.
A coal miner.
I look in the libraries
and I find thousands of words on Moore and his motivations:
Paris
Picasso
the usual.
I look for words on my dad.
There are none.
Not even words on a gravestone.
We could't afford one.
Two artists creating daily.
Anonymously.
One fed the minds of the
bourgeoisie;
the other fed their pockets.
And so
All art must will lead us somewhere; as for where,
no one knows.
