POETRY

POETRY

SAND FLATS AT WEST KIRBY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.3K views

At low water the sand flats stretch unbroken

down the Dee estuary’s English coast

to the reed beds of Parkgate and Burton Marsh;

stretch beyond the islands in the river’s mouth –

Hilbre, Middle Eye and Little Eye –

towards the wind turbines in Liverpool Bay;

then along the head of the Peninsula,

past Meols, Leasowe, Wallasey and New Brighton,

to join the mudflats of the Mersey.

 

At low water the sand flats are safe to cross

to the islands – and you might feel you could walk

to that wind farm on Burbo Bank, or walk

to Wales and reach Snowdonia’s ranges,

despite the channels you cannot see,

and the waves encroaching which you cannot hear,

let alone see, because of the constant sound

of endless, restless, distant waters.

 

Here are such large skies of shifting clouds,

long veils of rain, unbroken sunlight –

such immense firmaments. This is a place

of horizons and mirage, of disquiet,

and exhilaration, like a lost element,

a lost dimension, as if you might glimpse

heaven or angels, or whatever else

may be at the world’s edge.

 

 

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POETRY

TERRITORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

We are sitting in a slate-roofed brick-built bower

in the ornamental gardens of our

favourite country house. A robin appears

on the flags at our feet. It cocks its head,

so as to better see us with its brown eye.

The three of us wait. Perhaps it has come

for crumbs. It hops under the bench – then flies off,

only to return almost immediately,

and resume its original position.

How fragile its legs seem, thinner than matchsticks,

snappable as twigs. It goes under the bench,

flies off again – and returns. This time

it hops up, and stands within a foot of my coat.

Its red breast close up and out of direct light

is a warm orange. It shats on the green bench.

Its excrement is whiter than snow on grass.

The three of us wait. It flies away,

and does not return. We have been warned.

 

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POETRY

LORD WOOLAVINGTON’S SHOOTING PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

Jimmy Buchanan, self-made whisky tycoon,

became Lord Woolavington of Lavington,

Sussex, in January ’22.

He acquired his peerage, it was said,

with a post-dated cheque signed ‘Woolavington’.

To celebrate he hosted a lavish

grouse-shooting party that Glorious Twelfth

on his moorland estate near the Moray Firth.

 

To prepare for the party, heather had been scorched

so young grouse might fatten on the new shoots.

The corpses of polecats and pine martens

had been hung on gates and from fence posts,

and skies emptied of hen harriers,

and purged of the dancing of red kites.

 

There is a photograph of a guest posing –

in tweeds, sporran, kilt, a gillie beside him,

a retriever at his feet – with his shotgun

at the ready. He is standing in a butt

of cut, piled heather. He is waiting

for the hired beaters to drive the birds up

so they are silhouetted against the sky.

 

 

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POETRY

CEMLYN BAY, YNYS MÔN

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.5K views

Across the bay – with its sweeping shingle beach –

is Wylfa nuclear power station,

outcome of ‘the white heat of technology’,

a Harold Wilson ’60s slogan, and now

in the process of being decommissioned.

Not for it the brutal elegance of

cooling towers. It looks like a motley

of allotment sheds some Gargantua

might have thrown together from discarded sheets

of asbestos and corrugated iron.

 

Beneath the headland path we are standing on

are petrified sediments laid down

perhaps five hundred million years ago.

On either side among the grasses

are thrift, bird’s foot trefoil, and sea kale,

and, crossing it, a fox moth caterpillar.

We can hear oyster catchers and terns

on the salt water lagoon behind a ridge

of shingle along one stretch of beach.

 

***

 

The lagoon was mud-flats, breeding ground

during summer’s low tides for mosquitoes

not seabirds, until one Captain Hewitt

RNVR Rtd. had a weir built

to keep the water levels high throughout the year –

and now as well as terns  and oyster catchers

there are mergansers and little grebes.

 

Vivian Hewitt – son of a brewery

magnate; plutocrat;  apprentice

railway engineer; Royal Navy test pilot;

collector of Great Auk skins and blown eggs;

first man to fly from Wales to Ireland,

to be exact from Kinmel Bay, Rhyl,

to Phoenix Park, Dublin, through dense fog,

in a Bleriot-type wood and wire bi-plane,

an event eclipsed by the Titanic’s

sinking some thirteen days earlier –

looked for somewhere deserted to live

on the ship wreck prone north coast of Anglesey.

 

He bought a seventeenth century farmhouse

a hundred yards from the bay, and a mile

and more from the nearest neighbours; lived there

for thirty five years with his housekeeper

and her two sons; constructed the bird reserve

and sanctuary. Around a large area

of land adjacent to the house he had

local craftsmen build a twenty foot high

brick wall to keep the non-native trees, shrubs

and flowers he planted and re-planted

safe from the prevailing and unstinting winds.

Each experiment died or failed to thrive.

 

***

 

We post some photos on social media.

A friend on Facebook tells us that, this spring,

walking to Cemlyn Bay on the coastal path

through the old wind-swept woodlands in full leaf

beside the power station, he could hear,

beneath the bird song that filled the green air,

the unrelenting hum of giant fans

cooling forever the reactor’s

redundant and myriad rods of fuel.

 

 

 

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POETRY

HISTORY LESSON

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.3K views

Gaza, according to the Old Testament,

was, directly or indirectly,

frequently in receipt of God’s wrath,

most spectacularly when the Jewish giant,

Samson – who had been there whoring – was blinded

by its unsavoury residents, and bound

to the pillars of their heathen temple.

He brought it down around their ears, and his.

Millennia later, John Milton wrote:

‘Gaza still stands, but all its Sons are fall’n’.

 

***

 

Once, when we were learning about some outrage

or other, our history teacher observed

that there were two types of human being:

those we could imagine invading our homes

in the dead of the night, assembling us

in the street, and harrying us onto the trains

for Auschwitz – and those we couldn’t. Though perhaps

some of my peers wondered who they might be

it never occurred to me I would not be

one who felt for the oppressed: for the Jews,

of course, the Irish, Roma, Kurds,

Palestinians – all the migrant

and indigenous peoples of the earth,

defiled, displaced, diminished, denied.

 

***

 

The history of humankind seems to be one

of small tribes continually warring over

small plots of land that might produce

the odd pitcher of milk and honey.

And, it seems, in any particular place

or time, the tribe that gets to write the book gets

to invent the past or tell the truth, gets to

destroy the present or make it, gets to

determine the future.

 

 

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POETRY

AT WORLD’S END

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

For Tricia Durdey

 

As she walked up the muddy, overgrown path –

a path that was sometimes beside the river

in white-water spate from a night of rain,

and sometimes through the oak woods, leaves falling

gently as if choreographed – she thought

despairingly of events half the world

away, the rights and wrongs of ancient horrors,

modern outrage. When she reached the summit

there was World’s End: a ruined chapel.

A crow flew up noisily from what

might have been the altar. From crevices

in the tumbled walls ferns grew, and moss

covered the floor’s broken paving stones –

a seemingly romantic, gothic folly.

Local legend had berserk Norsemen slaughter

Celtic Christian families hiding in the chapel,

and set the oaken roof-beams alight.

 

She began to descend, thinking how easy

the legend made choosing the right side,

the side of goodness, and kindness, of hope

not despair, however much such a choice

was a considered act of faith and balance –

like walking downhill on that muddy path

safely beside the tumbling river.

Suddenly she thought we are more than our lives,

and smiled at such mystical metaphysics,

but said out loud, ‘Yes, we are more than our lives’.

 

 

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