POETRY

POETRY

MOONLIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read739 views

The full moon, part hidden by a wispy cloud

tinged grey with spring rain, lights the walls of the mill

and a tree in leaf at the water’s edge.

An oil lamp has been lit in a small window.

The water wheel begins to turn. The millstones,

their grinding muffled, judder the earth.

The creamy race pours from the wheel back

into the river thickened by the rain,

which is already falling on moorland

and its abandoned, shattered, moonlit crofts.

 

On the opposite bank a young girl

looks up briefly. She is alone, kneeling

in the shadows above a shallow inlet.

Only her bonnet and smock catch the dim light,

and the small bundle she has placed before her.

The abundant waters tumble past.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

RAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read800 views

Heavy rain flung against the window panes

wakes me in the dark. In the lull before

the next gust I hear your breath, a sound

I have known now for most of my life.

A spate of raindrops patters on the glass.

Faraway, on the kitchen windowsill,

are pots of bulbs – crocus and daffodil –

sprouting in the early morning gloom.

 

The sun will approach first via low, wet hills

cleft into valleys, then ancient salt pans, dew ponds,

and hedgerows tangled with blackthorn and dog rose.

And you might be awake, hearing my breath.

You are my talisman, my totem, muse,

scourge, sanctifier, love.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FOOL’S GOLD

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read800 views

Threatened in the wild, razed for firewood, its bark

once the repository of prayers,

this Himalayan birch – planted to screen us

from our neighbour’s blind back bedroom windows

or vice versa – has, almost overnight

it seems, in a tardy autumn, turned

from pastoral green to gold, the gilt

of palaces and of temples, a wind-

shivered, aureate filigree, tear-shaped,

that burnishes the heart. When leaves have gone

bricks and pebble-dash where nothing happens

will appear obscurely as if through fingers

spread wide to mitigate the sunlight.

A sliver of bark like a leaf of paper

will catch in the bamboo beneath the tree.

Maybe this year or next we will inscribe,

with the finest brush, the Sanskrit prayer:

‘May we never quarrel!’.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

COMMERCE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read496 views

By eyes as blue as heaven we are appraised,

and found wanting. Their owners jostle away

squealing. In open sheds high on the moor

hundreds of pinkish pigs, bred in Scotland

to be slaughtered in the Home Counties,

are fattening. Out among the heather

and abandoned bell pits, whose worked-out coal seams

are long grown over, Blackface sheep graze safely.

 

East, over the sea – blue too today,

and with an oil tanker sailing north –

is the rest of Europe, and, out of sight,

the AI and the East Coast line: West,

the Cheviots, and Eildon Hill’s three peaks

over the border, and centuries

of banditry between.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

HERITAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read529 views

From this part of the Hall the pit’s winding gear –

now defunct, of course – is clearly visible

above a line of oaks and beeches

a mile or so across fields and hedges.

A narrow coal seam was opened up

nearly a quarter of a mile below,

and subsidence, now fixed, cracked the chapel walls.

Visitors note the different shades of plaster,

and that the stained glass windows were undamaged –

then stroll among flower beds, along

espaliered walks, across well-tended lawns

loud with children’s cries. Hundreds of yards beneath

are abandoned tunnels, unworked coal seams.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

DIVERSIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read946 views

Two sets of works on local busy A roads

on the same day, morning and afternoon,

diverted me down lanes I had not travelled

for decades: eastwards to Beeston Castle

on its sandstone rock, westwards to Essar’s

refinery on the Mersey marshes;

spring lanes edged with cow parsley, and banked

with hawthorn hedges flowering; Friesians

glimpsed through a gate, a ploughed field’s furrows

the turned colour of mahogany;

through Saxon settlements – Foulk Stapelford

and Hargrave, Picton Gorse and Little Stanney,

Hoofield and Wervin – as if the Romans

had never come, and the Normans never would;

from doomsday parish to doomsday parish;

sunlight shifting, seasons unfolding,

the past almost within grasp.

 

 

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