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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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GLIMPSING GODS
That evening in the Poseidon Lounge of our
5 star clifftop hotel, spa & resort –
with the tideless Mediterranean
lapping soundlessly, timelessly out of sight –
there was something about the in-house
entertainment team’s announcing
the week’s festivities, some gaucheness perhaps,
an enforced glee, which reminded me
of school camp on the Lleyn Peninsula
the August I was nine, and we ate
Wagon Wheels round the fire, and told jokes
about Hitler, the war being recent.
The first day I woke anxious at dawn, and peed
in my sleeping bag. I told no one, and slept
in damp bedding for however many days
and nights we were there in the ex-army
ridge tent, vast, dark, noisome. Even in sun I
shivered and drifted as my fever rose –
and nobody knew. On Porth Neigwl beach,
or Hell’s Mouth, where Atlantic rollers roar
I dreamt – beyond my insouciant fellows’
paleness in the shimmering and pulsing waves –
I saw a glistening, slate grey dolphin
rise and fall, effortlessly, endlessly.
4 responses to “GLIMPSING GODS”
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Beautiful, David. I love the travelling back to childhood – very evocative. I felt moved by it and wanted more – was disappointed it ended.
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I think this poem reminds me of a helplessness we can feel when we’re young that twists in the heart, probably until we shuffle off…
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Lovely poem David… those moments of watching and waiting when usually nothing happens…. And then a dolphin.
As with me, Mick and Dave, on the latter’s lobster boat on an insane short-notice (decided upon in the pub at closing time) overnight trip from Alderney down to Guernsey, drifting silent on the falling tide as the engine had conked. Dave down a hole in the deck, oil-covered and cursing his spanners,, or lack of them. Mick and me grinning at him, having a fag in the moonlight, looking ahead into a silver sea…
We are bumped hard by something big, and spin. “What the f**k was that?” Dave shouts, his bandanered head shooting out of the deck. “Nothin’ Dave… only a small whale…”, we laugh…
And watch as a black wet back after rising, slides by, and sinks…. Silent.
Like yours, a memory never to be forgotten, and possibly impossible to adequately re-tell in describing the inner vision of that moment in our heads.
Mick now dead, our phone conversations always included… “Do you remember when….?”…. And I do, as if both it, and he, was only yesterday. -
Memories. Thank you, David.
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