POETRY

POETRY

INCIDENT AT BULL BAY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K 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 read1.9K 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 read1.7K 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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POETRY

WEST KIRBY, WIRRAL

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

Standing on the embankment that separates

the Marine Lake from the Dee Estuary

I can see the world’s curvature and compass:

east, over the lake, a hundred yards away,

is The Promenade; south – beyond the dinghies

moored midstream, their halyards tinkling

in the steady breeze – the white cooling towers

and the cable-stayed bridge at Connah’s Quay;

west, Flintshire’s industrial shore rising

steeply to become Halkyn Mountain,

where a fire has begun in the gorse

and the bracken on Holywell Common;

north west, Hilbre, island of erstwhile

pilgrimage then commerce; north – beneath

the horizon where ships wait for high tide

to cross the Liverpool Bar – West Kirby’s beach,

stretching into a mile of sand flats that ends

where the distant waves break ashen and silent.

 

 

Note: This is a revised version of the piece first published on the site in August 2013. I have taken in the last year or so – encouraged by Sylvia Selzer – to reading poems about places aloud in situ. Reading this one aloud on West Kirby prom made clear the original’s infelicities of syntax – and three factual errors.

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POETRY

THE OCCASIONAL JUBILEE

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

Her Majesty’s Government is cavorting

like the plot of a Gilbert and Sullivan

operetta, but without the witty words

and tunes; cavorting like Fred Karno’s army,

but without the deadpan genius

of Charlie Chaplin or Stan Laurel.

It as if those diagrams of the ascent

of man – from amoebae through dinosaurs

and whales to primates each less simian

than its predecessor – were to end

not in an upright homo sapiens

walking steadfastly into the future

to take his place before the wicket

or through the barbed wire towards the foe,

acting with honour, or, at least, aspiring,

but in homo mendax a shambling, dishevelled

creature, a cad, a bounder, a blackguard,

given to orotund clichés, and the

encouragement of corruption, the shameless

exploitation of the UK’s unwritten

constitution, the gentlemen’s agreement

that has obtained since Queen Victoria

was a lass – whose uncle, her predecessor,

was the last UK head of state to have

the power to dismiss a government.

‘We shall rule, your Majesty, but appear

to kowtow like proper subjects. We shall act

discreetly, justly, maintaining the forces

of law and order, and the Army,

and the Navy, in order to preserve

your status quo – keeping the Irish, the Scots,

and the Welsh in their place or, preferably,

packing them off to foreign lands. Your Majesty shall have –

and, indeed, we shall help you fund – your houses

and your horses, your titles and your corgis,

and the occasional jubilee.’

 

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POETRY

KEEPING THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.2K views

‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD, George Orwell, 1946

 

Democratic socialist, polemicist;

novelist, poet, writer of social

and economic commentary;

Old Etonian, ex-Superintendent

of the Indian Imperial Police,

veteran of the Spanish Civil War;

Sergeant Eric Blair (aka George Orwell)

commanded a Home Guard platoon in London.

 

The platoon – which was known locally

as the ‘Foreign Legion’ because so many

of its members were refugees from

persecution in Nazi Germany

and Tzarist Russia – was one of twelve hundred

volunteer groups of part-timers mustered

nationally to delay and to frustrate

a German invasion long enough

for full-time troops to arrive and deploy.

 

Orwell, rejected from active service

because of his lungs – he would die from TB

ten years later – thought the Home Guard a

peculiarly British institution.

More than two million men being ordered

to keep an Enfield 303 rifle

and ammunition at home suggested

a complacent, almost feudal state of mind.

 

The author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road

to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Decline of the English

Murder’ had a flat in Langford Court,

Abbey Road – some thirty years too soon

to hear the Beatles sing, ‘Love is all you need.’

From the roof of his building he could observe

the fires of the Blitz in the Thames’ docks

and their adjoining terraced streets – and stray bombs

falling quite near him on Lords’ Cricket Ground

and London Zoo in The Regent’s Park,

one of many public spaces owned

by the Crown. History does not record

his being aware that a zebra

and a wild ass and its foal had escaped

during a raid. They were caught in Camden Town,

not very far from the edge of the parkland.

If he had known he might perhaps have made it

some sort of metaphor.

 

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