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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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GRAND DESIGNS
Herons and egrets rise from the same shared ground –
a silted tidal estuary – rise
among expanses of marshland grasses,
vivid as shamrock, darker than samphire;
fly north on measured wing beats towards the sea,
to fish where the tide is slowly ebbing.
Beside the dirt path in the wild border
are campion, vetch, and bird’s foot trefoil –
scatterings of gold and purple and pink
and ancient names among the stinging nettles,
those tale-tellers of broken habitations.
Each sandstone block of the now redundant
two mile long sea wall was planned, ordered, paid for,
quarried, cut, carted, meticulously laid.
Now, in its foundations, scurvy grass grows.
3 responses to “GRAND DESIGNS”
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Sweet. You could read it ten times straight and not empty the cup!
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Hi, David! Thanks for this group of poems, set in a landscape you (and Sylvia) know so well and which for us over in Yorkshire has many happy associations. Like Harvey, I admire the vivid observation, here and elsewhere, of birds and plants, observation grounded in understanding. I particularly liked your description of the stinging nettles as ‘those tale-tellers of broken habitations’, where ‘habitations’ seems to have a biblical resonance – all those desolate habitations in Isaiah and Jeremiah. Grand designs indeed!
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Yes, I had in mind ‘And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls’ in Isaiah 34:13.
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