POETRY

POETRY

TRAETH LLANDWYN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

At the water’s gentle edge – that can be

storm-driven, flinging sand, seaweed, pebbles,

eroding the dunes, uprooting the seaward

margins of the forest of planted pines

in whose deepest reaches ravens roost –

my granddaughter stands facing the sea,

as she has most summers of her nine years.

 

In one of the glades of the manmade forest

sibilant with the bay and an off-shore breeze –

along the landward edge of the beach –

someone has hung a length of blue climbing rope

from the one of the tallest trees. Today

she has found it, and arcs above pine cones,

kidney vetch, marram grass, over grains

of sand, subdued, shifting.

 

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POETRY

HELL’S MOUTH

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

Though all the lanes leading to Hell’s Mouth are lined

with parked cars nevertheless we find a place

in the official park between a van

hiring out surfing gear and one selling

ice cream. The path to the beach is crammed with folk,

and the strand itself littered with bodies

and surf boards, almost obscuring the breakers

from the distant North Atlantic everyone

has come to see or ride. We retreat,

noting the orderly, overgrown ruins

of the RAF air gunnery range.

 

Some mobile phones here will roam to Ireland.

The world, at certain latitudes, has become

a small, crowded space. The popular place name,

it is claimed, was bestowed by English sailors

fearing the hell of the surf, its deceiving

misty spray, the desert of the hinterland,

and the ship-wrecking maw of the bay

with jagged cliffs at either end like molars.

The Welsh name – Porth Neigwl – may be translated,

‘Gateway of Clouds’.

 

 

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POETRY

CILAN UCHAF

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.8K views

From a grassy cliff top, shorn by sheep and wind,

at the Llyn Peninsula’s southern most tip,

we can see across North Cardigan Bay

to Harlech and the heights of Snowdonia,

stretching east to Bala, south beyond Barmouth,

north far beyond Porthmadog. Below

are gulls silent in the thermals – beneath them,

a sickle-shaped cove of sand and shingle.

The ancient place name translates, ‘Highest Chamber’.

 

Through a gate, beside a fishermen’s path,

in some farmer’s field is an unsignposted,

small neolithic burial chamber,

looted aeons ago, of course, but its vast

capstone and the smaller uprights, though slipped

a little, too long ago to be remembered,

are effectively in place. Whether the stones

were already nearby – ice age detritus –

or had to be hauled from afar, someone

thought life mattered enough to acknowledge death

with a major piece of engineering.

 

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POETRY

NORTH CARDIGAN BAY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

This evening’s gibbous moon is a blood orange,

rising over Snowdonia’s ranges

and Criccieth Castle’s promontory,

shining its rippled beams across the waves

unerringly towards us. Much later

it transforms into a gleaming silver, moving

south and high over Harlech Castle,

that towers above the far, dark shore.

 

From first light the sand and shingle beach,

beneath our windows, is lined with the black,

triangular paraphernalia

of solitary sea anglers. Diligent

environmentalists they return

each bream, and bass, and dab into the sticky,

salty vestiges of the Gulf Stream,

and stow away their gear like good children.

 

As the storm-gauge falls, the day turns humid, still,

and haze, out in the bay, mid-afternoon,

thickens into a smoke-grey cloud that seems

to hover just above the surface

of the glassy sea. Horizontal lightning

sparks and flashes, flashes and sparks, and thunder

rumbles briefly. The storm dwindles, becoming

a rain shower, and the bay begins to clear.

In the dusk we can almost see the castles.

Tonight the moon is gold.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

PORTH LLECHOG

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

The place name is frequently translated as

‘sheltered bay’, and so it is this hour

as she studies the fresh, pellucid rock pools

the last tide left; gently nets creatures trapped

and waiting – two small crabs and a shrimp –

and holds them up to the air briefly to marvel

at their peculiar uniqueness; returns them,

watching while they hide. She is hardly a child,

not entirely a child. She is tall and lithe

and svelte and supple; a girl gradually

becoming a woman; somewhere already

on that swift journey that seems to take

forever; somewhere on the margins

of childhood and adulthood – like the shore line

the tide is beginning to shift. And ‘porth’

can mean ‘portal’ or ‘gateway’, and ‘llech’

can mean ‘rock’, ‘og’ ‘harrow’, which better suits

the long furrows the endless tides have made

in these rocks, layered with golden seaweed,

during the last five hundred and fifty

million years or so,  and amongst which

she still crouches, net poised.

 

 

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POETRY

SS LUSITANIA ON HER SEA TRIALS 1907

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

An amateur photographer was lucky

enough, or sufficiently patient,

to catch the Clydebank-made Lusitania

from a sheep-cropped Anglesey headland

– with her four funnels, six decks for passengers,

the hidden glistening luxury

of a grand hotel – on her sea trials

in the Irish Sea. The transatlantic route

was a lucrative race between the British

and the Germans – part of the long proxy war

before the War itself. The Admiralty

subsidised Cunard to build the steamer.

 

Eight years later, a U-boat sank her,

eleven miles off the Kinsale Lighthouse

in County Cork. All fifteen hundred perished.

There was justification, and outrage.

The USA entered the Great War.

Though a salvageable wreck, she is deemed

dangerous. The hold contains munitions.

 

The postcard size print is out of focus

and the day is misty, but the four funnels

are unmistakable.

 

 

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