POETRY

POETRY

ACROSS THE WATERS

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

Walking – toward the town – down Henlys Lane,

its low, lichen covered dry stone walls

adorned with bird’s-foot trefoil, its borders

with cow parsley and, where run-off

gathers from Baron’s Hill, red campion,

we note ahead, amongst the cattle,

the usual, large flock of herring gulls,

facing south in the low-lying marshy field.

All as we have come to know and like.

But, today, we hear an explosion – loud

enough but too workaday to be thunder.

We stop and look beyond the library,

the castle and the Straits to search the mauve

galleries of Bethesda’s slate quarries.

Nothing disturbs the distant, hazy stillness.

 

Later, on the way to the car, we pass

the unfinished Plantagenet castle

the final subjection of the Welsh made

redundant and hear a second blasting

from across the waters – and I know

how favoured our generation was removed

from wars, and how, like flowers, tenuous,

robust, our path to the future or the past.

 

 

 

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POETRY

PLAY STATION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

We are zapping Lego Star Wars’ characters.

Patiently, she shows me how to handle

the console – its buttons and paddle.

How kind she is about my ineptitude!

She commentates throughout. I am a convert.

This is no more solitary than reading –

with a work-out of psycho-motor skills!

 

But she is passive watching ‘Ninjago’ –

its violence, rudeness, a lack of irony,

a plenty of sarcasm – and its Lego

manikins: humour bypass, prosthetic hands,

stunted vocal range, corporate creatures

stumping through their weatherless universe

in full-length feature advertisements.

 

She begins to recover,  trying to

balance a peacock feather on her palm.

We suggest the park where she has learned to climb

a holly tree – up inside the branches,

thick with dark leaves and bright with berries

in the mellow, October weather.

 

She scoots through the park gates before us

but swiftly reappears. “Grandma, Grandpa, look!”

and points. The autumn’s leaves are spread on paths

and grass like golden snow.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ABERFAN

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments1 min read2.7K views

We were staying that weekend with your parents

at their corner shop to tell them you were

two months pregnant. You were already there

on Friday night when I came through the back door.

You were in the kitchen at the sink. A programme

about Captain Scott and his companions

entombed in ice and sliding seawards

was playing unwatched in the living room.

You told me the news about Aberfan.

 

That evening and in the many, many days

to follow there were bulletins and pictures,

all black and white memory suggests –

the rescuers of hope, the devastation –

then explanations, recriminations –

‘the price of coal’, a forgotten spring

seeping beneath the tip – but, above all,

above all, the hillside of dark slag

glistening in the October sunlight.

 

Twenty years later I took a school assembly

and read Leslie Norris’s ‘Elegy

for David Beynon’, the deputy head

at Pant Glas Primary, who died

in the slurry with children in his arms.

I did not cry then, a youngish man,

as I read the last quatrains to an intent

audience of young people but I cry now,

in the knowledge of my age, writing of

such love amid such waste.

 

 

Notes: 1. The Aberfan disaster occured on 21st October 1966; 2. Leslie Norris’s poem, ‘Elegy for David Benyon’ – http://www.aikiweb.com/blogs/moon-in-the-water-19051/land-slide-4296/

 

 

 

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POETRY

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.8K views

I was a scholar at a grammar school

founded by Henry VIII after he had

dissolved the monasteries, stolen their land,

destroyed their hospitals, tortured the odd

abbot or two and trousered their cash and plate.

The school, a Victorian extension

of the original, was ‘in the shadow

of the cathedral’, as the head would say –

an Anglican canon, MA Oxon.

There was, in the Canon’s dismal study,

a portrait of the priapic monarch.

The reverend would order those he caned –

for smoking, chewing gum -‘Face the founder’.

 

When I was in the fourth form, we learned about

the Kings of Israel, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’

the Armada and quadratic equations.

The Virgin Queen, Portia and Jezebel

would glide through the algebra. Our form room

overlooked the cathedral’s coke store

and was level with steps visitors would take

to the monks’ dormitories now Sunday School.

Americans predominated, mostly

elderly or so it seemed. Sometimes

a pretty girl would stop and turn and she

and I would briefly see eye to eye

before our lives diverged forever.

 

 

Note: On September 16th 2016 the school celebrated the 475th anniversary of its founding.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CROSSING THE COMPASS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.5K views

When I reach the half landing I will always

pause and at least glance through the long window

that frames garden, high wall, terraced roofs

and sky. I saw, one time, against roseate clouds

lit by the setting sun and billowing

in an easterly wind, dark like a line

of dancing letters, flock after flock

of black-headed gulls, crossing the compass

south east from the drowned meadows of the Dee

to the Mersey’s low tide mud flats north west.

 

For the last of the stragglers to pass,

it took long enough for a poem to catch,

for that slow, flickering, certain fire to take.

And I thought of caribou on the Tundra,

salmon in the Aleutians, swallows

over Timbuktu – and our loved ones,

their small migration north.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SEAFORTH BEACH, SIMONSTOWN, 2009

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

‘The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common – and must have forgotten many things as well.’ What is a Nation? Ernest Renan

 

Near the restaurant’s toilets, there was a large

framed print of a photograph of the beach

full of day trippers from Cape Town by train

one Christmas/New Year break in the ’50s –

when it was Slegs Blankes/Whites Only.

The restaurant’s customers were still white,

the staff black – by Toyota taxis daily

from the townships. On the beach, that windy

September day, African Penguins –

erstwhile ‘Jackass’ – were braying at the surf.

A Southern Whale and its young rose close

inshore and blew… From the bedroom window

of our three star guest house we could see,

in the moonlight, a young black man lay down

to sleep on the grassy bank near the sea’s edge.

In the morning he had gone. A submarine

sailed from the naval base, sounding its horn.

We watched a mist roiling slowly towards us

and the dark kelp bobbing.

 

 

 

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