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Anglesey

POETRY

ON THE BEACH

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read6.4K views

The top of the hour, and the front-page next day

of the regional news, featured the traffic

jammed from the car park near the beach, along

the forest road, past the site of the royal court

exiled by the English invaders,

past the public toilets, then into

the village of Newborough itself

(named and founded by the invaders);

and many miles either side of the village

on the only main road in that part

of the island of Ynys Môn (‘Anglesey’

in the language of the occupiers).

 

Influencers on TikTok and Instagram

had videoed themselves extolling

the solitary beauty of Traeth Llandwyn

(Newborough Beach), and so, that August day,

legions had come seeking something special – but saw

only somebody else’s exhaust fumes.

I felt a brief spasm of schadenfreude

remembering another August day.

 

Then there was no sign on the main road

or in Newborough village for the beach,

and the road through the forest was a track

among sand hills planted with pine saplings.

Except for us the beach was deserted,

a secret only lovers had discovered.

Its sands – edged landward by high dunes sprouting

marram grass – extended for miles, were littered

with sea wrack and oyster shells, with razor clams

and bleached driftwood. Seaward a flock of gulls

was slowly, silently crossing the still bay.

On the distant shore a range of mountains

stretched to the horizon.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

PORTH LLECHOG

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

The place name is frequently translated as

‘sheltered bay’, and so it is this hour

as she studies the fresh, pellucid rock pools

the last tide left; gently nets creatures trapped

and waiting – two small crabs and a shrimp –

and holds them up to the air briefly to marvel

at their peculiar uniqueness; returns them,

watching while they hide. She is hardly a child,

not entirely a child. She is tall and lithe

and svelte and supple; a girl gradually

becoming a woman; somewhere already

on that swift journey that seems to take

forever; somewhere on the margins

of childhood and adulthood – like the shore line

the tide is beginning to shift. And ‘porth’

can mean ‘portal’ or ‘gateway’, and ‘llech’

can mean ‘rock’, ‘og’ ‘harrow’, which better suits

the long furrows the endless tides have made

in these rocks, layered with golden seaweed,

during the last five hundred and fifty

million years or so,  and amongst which

she still crouches, net poised.

 

 

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POETRY

SS LUSITANIA ON HER SEA TRIALS 1907

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

An amateur photographer was lucky

enough, or sufficiently patient,

to catch the Clydebank-made Lusitania

from a sheep-cropped Anglesey headland

– with her four funnels, six decks for passengers,

the hidden glistening luxury

of a grand hotel – on her sea trials

in the Irish Sea. The transatlantic route

was a lucrative race between the British

and the Germans – part of the long proxy war

before the War itself. The Admiralty

subsidised Cunard to build the steamer.

 

Eight years later, a U-boat sank her,

eleven miles off the Kinsale Lighthouse

in County Cork. All fifteen hundred perished.

There was justification, and outrage.

The USA entered the Great War.

Though a salvageable wreck, she is deemed

dangerous. The hold contains munitions.

 

The postcard size print is out of focus

and the day is misty, but the four funnels

are unmistakable.

 

 

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POETRY

THE PIER, BEAUMARIS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Low water now and the motley of crabbers

is crammed towards the end of the pier,

leaving space for a merry metaphor

of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,

with its innuendo and innocence,

its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville

of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,

its charivari of anachronisms.

 

The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once

a private mansion of many rooms)

and the stone terrace of late Georgian

town houses in this holiday resort

speak of its erstwhile strategic value.

The servants in the yards would beat the fleas

from the covers, the curtains and the carpets.

 

Nobody takes home the crabs they catch.

The seabed surrounding the pier’s stanchions

is littered with the plastic detritus

of crabbing – nets, lines, bait bags of offal.

In dreams mottled crabs are manoeuvring

to the tops of the buckets, and scuttling

across the planks seawards.

 

 

Note: Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus – www.prom-prom.com.

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POETRY

LLANDWYN, YNYS MÔN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Along the path beside the forestry road,

through the plantation of pine and larch

planted as saplings to keep the dunes in check,

there is a first sighting of the island

with its mediaeval saint’s ruined chapel,

between the trees and across a sandy beach.

 

Out of sight is a pebbly strand exposed

except at the highest tides: an impromptu

causeway – for holiday makers now;

once, for lovers to the chapel with its

rumours of martyred blessings; and, once,

for soldiers, manning the concrete pill-box,

out of sight at the island’s seaward end

above the cove of beached razor shells.

 

No invaders came to fill those years of tides –

except cormorants to breed on rocks

below the redoubt, and odd, nameless couples

across the mainland’s sand hills and scurvy grass,

over the slip trench and through the barbed wire

like soldierly pilgrims.

 

 

 

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POETRY

HOLYHEAD BREAKWATER COUNTRY PARK

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K 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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