POETRY

POETRY

ABSENCES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read347 views

Yesterday, while I was reading in the shade,

a dragonfly came from nowhere, landing on the lawn

in the sun near my chair. Light coruscated

on the extraordinary gossamer

of its wings, the polished bronze of its body.

A sudden breeze stirred the pages of my book.

The dragonfly rose skyward soundlessly.

 

At opposite corners of our roof, starlings,

for a quarter century and more,

made their nests in gaps in the soffits.

We knew their curious whistles, the scrabbling

beneath the eaves, the soft chirruping.

 

This May wild bees nested in one of the gaps.

Dark prancers, they have filled a patch of sky

with a low humming, a murmuration

of glades, of groves.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

SAND BUILDERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read359 views

The road makers built a culvert so the stream

might still flow beside the ice cream kiosk

onto the beach and disappear in the sands,

as it did from before the mammoths left.

The brief delta that it forms attracts

engineers of all genders and all ages.

Some are equipped with long-handled spades,

and with robust buckets, while some make-do.

There are ten builders, navigators –

mostly strangers working in quiet harmony –

making dams, and moats for crenellated keeps.

Later, when everyone has gone and the tide

is lapping against the highest ramparts,

and washing away the sturdiest of levees,

a little egret lands at the water’s edge

for crabs and razor clams.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FIELD

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read332 views

In a pond at the furthest edge of the field,

fallow this year and last and before that,

are bulrushes still wintry coloured.

 

Who owns this field now and why it is unused

so much I do not know. I remember

travellers’ shaggy piebalds wintering here.

And, long before soya or maize, a cash crop

of broad beans, and a fox hiding in it

from the hunt – the baying hounds leashed;

the master in his red coat riding the field’s

boundaries; his black-coated colleagues

dismounted in the lane. Rain fell, softly,

pattering on the leaves. The master, alone,

on foot, continued patrolling – his coat

losing its colour in the damp dusk.

Next day, though the crop was immature,

he ordered a ‘harvest’. There was no sign

of the fox, not even its droppings.

 

The bulrushes, ready to seed, are still upright;

seem, at this distance, forlorn like white,

unlit candles at some lost garden party,

some neglected fête.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRAVELLERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read354 views

As we walk beside the wide estuary

we follow a wheatear as it waits for us

on the embankment of the rough causeway

then bobs and flits from stone to stone as we near,

enticing us, flashing its white rump,

which is pure white like an egret’s feathers.

 

We watch the tide beneath the low viaducts

begin to rise. On tracks Stephenson built

the London-Holyhead train crosses,

passes close to Edward’s grey castle walls.

Waders are gathering on the mudflats –

curlews, red shanks, egrets – denizens,

immigrants. This bird, which led us from its nest

among the embankment’s crevices, will

winter in Africa.

 

 

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POETRY

SICKLES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read311 views

Fleetingly across the lawn a swift’s shadow

falls. I look up. In the blue mid-summer

mid-morning is the moon, a hazy crescent.

Swifts race, with their brief whistles, over the house.

The already heavy air is cut

momentarily by their wings – and then

they are gone into the ancient azure.

 

Beneath the plum tree, among seeds scattered

from the bird feeders, are barley, wheat, rye.

They took root, and now are green and tall –

wild grasses tamed with stone sickles ten

thousand years ago. We will harvest them with

curve bladed secateurs.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE PATHWAY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read375 views

The south east corner of the high garden wall

has been extended slightly to form a curved,

slate-roofed, white-washed brick bower

with a wooden seat inset into the bricks.

The bower can be approached from two directions:

along a narrow, gravel path between

the eastern wall and a well tended copse

of hazel and sycamore, where wild garlic

is abundant in the spring; or edging

through the scant, unkempt, mossy space along

the southern wall – past a row of holly trees,

the back of a large thatched playhouse,

and the south side of the copse. From the bower,

on this last day of summer, the air

murmurs with bees, and sunlight lingers

among the leaves. The edge of the copse,

the high stippled wall, and the untrodden

pathway beckon, beckon.

 

 

 

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