POETRY

POETRY

NUMBER 6

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.2K views

For Arthur Kemelman

 

‘To find the right road out of this despair [the pain of those who walk through the night blindly] civilized man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe’. THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS, Bertrand Russell, 1930

 

The village post office in Penrhyndeudraeth,

Merioneth, was very busy

during the Cuban Missile Crisis

with telegrams to Kennedy and Kruschev

from Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell – philosopher,

logician; mathematician, author;

moralist, socialist, pacifist.

 

He lived nearby, down a lane, in a late

seventeenth, early eighteenth century house

with a veranda that commanded views

of the Glaslyn estuary, Porthmadog,

Traeth Mawr, and, south east – if the earth were not

almost round – beyond the tip of Ireland

the Americas. There he had been

labelled – “a believer in free love…

a free thinker…a commie”. ‘Americans,’

he believed, ‘are terrified of thought’.

 

Below, on the promontory, hidden

by deciduous woods is Portmeirion,

the fantasy village, where Russell once stayed –

an invited guest with Noel Coward,

H.G. Wells and King Zog of Albania –

and laid the foundation stone of the Dome,

a modest homage to Brunelleschi.

 

Perhaps one bright afternoon in ’66 –

on the veranda in his cane chair,

observing the sun over the Atlantic,

smoking a pipe of his favourite

Friborg & Treyer’s Golden Mixture –

he thought he heard, vivid as in a dream,

someone declare, ‘I am not a number…’

 

 

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POETRY

FUTILITY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

Some scenes in ‘On The Beach’ especially haunt:

the Stanley Kramer black and white movie based

on Neville Shute’s novel of nuclear

apocalypse. The US and Russia –

by accident or design is unclear –

have depopulated each other

and the rest of the northern hemisphere,

except for continuous morse signals,

that make no sense, emanating from

a refinery in San Diego,

Southern California. Perhaps someone

somehow survived the radiation.

 

The nuclear submarine, USS

Sawfish, sequestered by chance in Melbourne

when the cataclysms occurred, leaves port

to find out. As the sub approaches

the West Coast, crew from ‘Frisco ask the captain

if they might view the city through the periscope.

He agrees. The street car rails, in an empty

Market Street, glint. One of the sailors absconds,

swimming ashore to the Ferry Terminal,

knowing he will die from radiation

in days. The vessel sails out of the Bay,

under the Golden Gate Bridge, and down the coast

five hundred miles to San Diego.

 

They find no one alive. The morse equipment,

powered by a hydraulic generator,

is in an abandoned office block.

The morse key has been attached to a half-full

bottle of Coke, which, in turn, is attached

to a drawn blind at an open window.

As the wind blows across the Pacific

so the blind trembles, the Coke bottle jerks,

and the key taps, taps – long, short, short short, long –

depending on the air, which will, in time,

irradiate the global south.

 

 

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POETRY

TRAETH LLANDWYN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K 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 read1.9K 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 read2K 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 read1.4K 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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