POETRY

POETRY

PORTH LLECHOG

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K 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 read2.3K 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

NORTH COAST, ANGLESEY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

This is a coast of wrecks, of conventional

tempests and unexpected rocks, mists, fogs.

 

St Patrick, not long from dismissing

the serpents of Ireland, clung to an outcrop

slippery with seaweed, loud with skuas.

Legend built a church on the cliffs above.

 

The Royal Charter, steam clipper, laden

with gold and souls, Australia bound

from Liverpool, foundered in haling distance

of the shore, one long October night of gales.

A parish churchyard is full of strangers.

 

Low water exposes the remains

of a lifeboat station’s high wooden pillars

held in rough concrete blocks. A sloop in full sail

could slide down the steep ramp in seconds.

In less than sixty years boats launched from here

saved more than sixty lives. Generations

of local men – farmers and fishermen,

blacksmiths and shepherds – along this coast,

merely for virtue’s reward, risking their own

saved the lives of strangers.

 

 

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POETRY

INCIDENT AT BULL BAY

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

At high water a small, blue-hulled trawler heads

at speed, seemingly navigating by sight

not charts, for the narrow inlet, where

two women are paddle-boarding.

 

Whoever is on watch spots the women

and the boat turns hard to port, and back

to the open sea. A century has passed

since the gradually sloping shingle beach,

with deep water at high tide, made this cove

ideal for inshore fishing boats. Curious

that the blue trawler – out of Cardigan,

according to its registration code,

many sea miles and promontories

to the south – should have been heading

directly here, and with such certainty,

as if for harbour. The paddle boarders –

a mother and daughter perhaps – have disembarked,

from this avatar of an ancient craft,

as gracefully as they can, apparently

oblivious of what might have happened.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

SEASCAPE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Once we have climbed the steep track to the cliff top

and seen that the coastal path is narrow

and edgy along the range of jagged cliffs

that stretch and turn for miles, we decide

discretion is the better part of aging

and sit on a new bench provided by

the kindly dead. We can hear the wind

in the gorse, sheep cropping the tussocky grass

at the very edge, and the waves out of sight

on the rocks below swell and fall, swell and fall…

 

There is a container ship turning slowly

on the horizon; nearer, the white sails

of a dinghy, the shimmering shadows

of a shoal of fish; and, bobbing closer still,

half a dozen lobster pot marker buoys.

Two seal heads appear briefly above the waves.

 

Suddenly a solitary dolphin

breaks the surface a hundred yards away.

We hear it exhale – its head, fin, back

glistening as it dives… And then a stillness…

almost a holding of breath…

 

 

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POETRY

LEGERDEMAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Perhaps a foot or so beneath the surface

of this beach is water – some the vestige

of the ebbing sea, most seeped from low cliffs

above the sands then imperceptibly

vanishing among the gritty particles.

 

Suddenly, from below the horizon,

a plume of black smoke emerges – as if,

for a moment, a coal powered steamer

were returning south. An oil rig, no doubt,

is burning off its excess methane

to dissipate into the distant nimbus.

 

Over a hole dug in the sand the shadow

of a herring gull glides slowly, the bird

briefly imaged in the shallow, tawny pool,

its snowy feathers dulled.

 

 

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