POETRY

POETRY

AFON CONWY

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read314 views

The river – tidal here, beginning to open,

becoming estuarial – rises

among the reeds on the boggy moors

in the foothills of the mountains, rushes

down waterfalls, becoming this wide,

settled course. The mountain ranges are shades

of mauve, lilac, delicate purples.

Through the hazy March sun snow glints on the peaks.

 

At low water, sandbanks, mid-river, glow

golden. On the glistening mud-banks along

the east shore, curlews and lapwings feed.

The blackened, wooden ribs of a sunken boat

protrude. There are branches, torn nets, a buoy.

 

The light airs from the south become a light breeze

until the tide turns and a fresh breeze rises

from the north. Pennants and rigging snap

and jangle as a chill wind takes hold.

The incoming tide melds with the river

in brown-water flurries at the edges

of the banks, then the runnels fill, and eddies

whirl wider and wider until all is one.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

BLACK DIAMONDS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read389 views

On what was once National Coal Board land,

at the edge of the former pit village

are car show rooms and a builders’ merchant –

like the outskirts of a provincial town

except for the slag heap, bull-dozed on top

and planted with birches, that looms above

the preserved pit head. Beyond the village

is pasture, and then a walled estate

with a modest late Georgian mansion,

open daily to the paying public,

set back above a shallow valley.

 

At the edge of this pastoral landscape,

a November sun, low in a misty sky,

turns the slag heap into a tumulus

and the winding gear into a prayer wheel –

a revolution’s relics. Through the vale

a brook, ice age vestige, meanders.

In its bed of pale silty clay, beneath

autumn leaves, are coal shards.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ETHEREAL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read265 views

The Facebook algorithm tells me I have

memories to share with friends – and when I look

I see that one of them died four years ago.

She was always a meticulous person

but seems to have neglected to leave details

of what to do with her Facebook account.

Now LinkedIn is encouraging me

to congratulate a colleague – deceased

these nine years – on his work anniversary.

Social media is filling with dead souls

that pass across our screens like shooting stars.

 

Maybe these are deliberate memento

mori; if accidental, permitted

by heirs celebrating the departed’s

sense of the absurd – or a casualness

about our commonwealth, like space debris:

the flecks of paint off bits of satellites,

an astronaut’s toothbrush, a rocket

lost, junked in the heavens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FAMOUS FOR POEMS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read241 views

For one week’s show-and-tell when my granddaughter

was seven she took in, unprompted,

the book I had dedicated to her.

She told her mother, “I told the teacher,

‘My grandpa was famous for poems.

He writes about everything in the world.’

But I don’t know why I said ‘was’.” Perhaps

she was rehearsing my obituary.

 

The teacher, keeping faith as the good will do,

sight-read the title poem, A JAR

OF STICKLEBACKS, to her multi-lingual,

multi-cultural class – a piece about shattered

glass, and spilt fish, and my grandpa rushing

to the rescue, which ends, ‘imagine me

holding up to the light, unbroken,

a jar with all your wishes, all your hopes’.

 

Note: see https://davidselzer.com/2013/01/a-jar-of-sticklebacks/ – the poem was first published by Armadillo Central – http://www.armadillocentral.com/armadillo-central/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-david-selzer.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE BANDSTAND

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read286 views

Beside the city’s river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands.

Since the pandemic it has been silent,

and empty except for an occasional

escaped toddler pattering across its floor,

their brief glee echoing from its roof.

 

Someone is sleeping rough in the bandstand

in a red sleeping bag. Though it is late

morning he or she still seems asleep.

Probably the last they heard of the night,

before they slept, was the river’s soft passing.

Perhaps the distant siren is not for them.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FEBRUARY BURNING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read427 views

One Saturday in February we drove

from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport

north up the valley of the Tiber

to Umbertide in Umbria,

a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,

and that had guarded the northern Marches

during the bloody and iconoclastic

turbulence of the Renaissance.

We passed Orvieto and Perugia.

The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,

emollient as a British day in late June.

Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks

of the motorway service stations.

When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts

the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.

Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell

ringing for mattutino, the flat fields

of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts

might lie – between the curving river

and the long road south – were drowned in mists.

 

This month, that here always used to be bleak

and wet, has become a changeling. Years

after Umbertide, on another

Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench

beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,

sunning ourselves like superannuated

terrapins. The uninhibited sun

burned through a haze of blushing coral

above Penmaenmawr over the bay.

Februarius from februum,

‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat

and the calm of love’s absolution.

 

 

 

 

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