POETRY

POETRY

HOLYHEAD BREAKWATER COUNTRY PARK

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

The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks

was the longest that the Admiralty

had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!

 

On the Country Park lake sown with lilies

an old man sails his battleship. The lake

was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,

built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed

in the limestone quarried from the crags

beside which visitors park their cars.

 

A grass path leads through heather and gorse

down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.

Linnets and stonechats rise from bracken.

A StenaLine car ferry clears the harbour

and steers for the Republic.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

Beside the first angle in the zigzag steps

that descend steeply to the lighthouse –

where I have stopped to rest lungs and knees

and vow again this will be the last –

unique to this place on our planet

a fleawort is growing, its flowerheads

like miniature sun flowers. A red beaked chough

calls from the heathland above – pyrrhocorax,

pyrrhocorax. I can see Ireland from here –

the hills and mountains south of Dublin –

over an indigo sea whose waves

are barely ripples. Before taxonomies,

before words is wonder.

 

 

 

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POETRY

REGATTA, MENAI STRAITS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

On the coast road across the straits the blue flash

of an ambulance appears, then disappears

behind a stand of trees and a barn.

 

The mainland late morning is so pellucid

one might almost count the dry stones in the walls

that mark the fields, climb past the sparse woods

and delineate the cropped moorlands

from the mountain tops. A cannon thud

starts the regatta of red sailed dinghies.

They scud and tack on the silvery straits,

their spinnakers burgeoning vainly.

 

The cannon thuds. Sails are furled and stowed.

The ebbing tide exposes wide sandbanks.

Swift clouds are covering the mountain peaks

and the woods are darkening, the road empty.

The brief day is over.

 

 

 

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POETRY

GRASSALKOVICH PARK, BRATISLAVA

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

Yesterday was New Year’s Eve and the fountain

was drained to prevent too much merriment.

So the bronze, nude young ladies disport themselves

in dry, cold air. The equestrian statue

of Maria Theresa, mother

of sixteen, and the last of the Holy

Roman Empresses appears unamused,

though whether by the municipality’s

actions or the girls’ appears unclear.

Last month’s heavy snow remains in small,

sheltered drifts behind occasional trees.

What was an Hungarian aristocrat’s

formal palace garden in the French style

has become – by dint of many wars

and a few revolutions – a public park,

where my granddaughter, descendant of Celts,

Jews and Vikings, a competitor, sprints

on the white, gravel paths.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CHANGING THE GUARD

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

The guard detachment for the presidential

palace – an NCO and four privates –

arrives in a taxi cab at ten a.m.

in front of our boutique hotel (with its own

micro brewery). They march – in somewhat

Ruritanian uniforms, rifles

shouldered – beside the high, concrete-faced wall

of what is now a public park and once

was the palace’s formal gardens before

the maps were redrawn. Some time later

we watch the high stepping sentry-go

through the ornate iron gates – Mittel Europa

transcending the carnage.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.1K views

In the summer of 1913, the last

Habsburg Emperor made a state visit

to Pressburg – later, after The Treaty

of Versailles, renamed Bratislava.

One photograph shows his open carriage

stopped in front of the Pressburg Yeshiva,

whose students came from every part

of the Empire. Franz Josef leans forward

to speak to Rabbi Akiva Sofer,

whose great grandfather founded the school –

two dynasties talking briefly together.

 

During the rule of the Communist Party

most of the erstwhile Jewish quarter was razed

to build a four lane bridge across the Danube.

After independence a memorial

to Slovakia’s murdered Jews was placed

on the site of a shul. The word ‘Remember’,

in Hebrew and Slovak, is engraved

into the black marble plinth. Often

little stones are placed haphazardly

on the marble as is the Jewish custom

and tradition: pebbles of mourning,

of safekeeping of souls, of memory.

 

In the streets and the squares were unremarked

small stones – where the Rabbi was waiting,

where the carriage wheels turned.

 

 

 

 

 

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