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Bay of Biscay

POETRY

MAÎTRE JACQUES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.8K views

Master James of St George d’Esperance, Savoy –

civil engineer and architect,

a Lutyens, a Vauban, a Speer –

was ‘master of the Kinges werkes in Wales’.

He built the castles at Rhuddlan, Conwy,

Harlech, Caernavon and Beaumaris –

all accessible from river or sea,

the last four with bastides (walled, fortified towns) –

for Edward I, England’s ninth Norman king,

in the latter’s campaign to rob the Welsh.

 

Beaumaris – the final touches unfinished

through lack of funds, and the subjugation

of the Welsh – has two concentric walls,

twenty four towers, and the remains

of a sea water moat and a dock,

all stone work patterned and meticulous.

The inner courtyard is the size of a grand

public square, somewhere for the King to survey,

from a window of the Great Hall – a goblet

of wine from Gascony at his lips,

an English harpist playing at his back –

Maître Jacques command masons and carpenters.

 

We do not know precisely where he was born

or died or when, or much else about him

apart from mentions by various

clerks of work in lists of expenditures –

and that his wife’s name was Ambrosia.

Where they both Savoyards? Did they ever

return? When they saw snow on the mauve mountains

over the Straits from Beaumaris did they think

of the many days’ journey south across

the Celtic Seas to the Bay of Biscay,

along the Garonne to Bordeaux, then by horse

skirting the lakes and crossing the rivers

of Occitania, the Alps of Savoy

in the friendly distance?

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A DEATH IN GASCONY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

We flew late, on the year’s busiest Friday,

to Toulouse. As we drove in the hire car

through Haut-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées

into Gascony, its rolling hills green

with August’s growth, the sun was setting –

the burgeoning fields of sunflowers paused, bats

swooped before the car like twilit angels.

 

As we topped each rise we could see the glow

fade in the west above the Bay of Biscay.

We arrived in darkness at the pension.

The patronne gave us supper on the terrace –

her bread, pâté, tomatoes, a local cheese.

A cascade of shooting stars fell in the north.

We toasted ill winds and silver linings.

 

We woke to an ass braying, a cock crowing,

and a bell tolling for early Mass.

We drove to the city of Auch, Coeur

de Gascogne. The crematorium was new

– floor to ceiling windows, light wood benches.

The deceased, it was said, had chosen Holst’s

‘Venus: The Bringer of Peace’ on his death bed.

 

The wake was in a bar on the square

in a small, erstwhile market town in sight

of the Pyrenees, its highest peaks snow capped.

The mourners were mostly English, settled

in renovated, abandoned farm houses.

Each of us had some ill fitting jigsaw piece

of his life: an exile, a fugitive?

 

There had been a week of summer events

in the square with its defiant poilu.

The festivities ended the next day

with a dance in the commune’s echoing

La Salle Des Fêtes. An accordion played.

Old couples with dyed hair, some singing softly,

fox trotted slowly to ‘La Vie En Rose’.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.8K views

In an ex-pat’s yard – Flemish or Dutch

the name on the gate suggests – the guinea fowl

panic. Two Booted Eagles are circling

down the valley from the ancient forest

of verdant oaks and chestnuts, sectoring

the yellow fields of maize and sunflowers

toward Monléon Magnoac, a village

now but once, before the Black Death, a new town

on a fortified hill top, one of more

than a thousand to soothe the wilderness

of Aquitaine, Languedoc and, here, Gascony

then English aka Norman crown estate.

Yet this was Basque country long before Norsemen

sailed through the Bosporus or up the Volga.

 

Northern Europeans have returned

as tax paying owner occupiers

rather than liege lords – an irony

which nobody appears to acknowledge.

 

After a night of rain, the river Gers,

rising in the Pyrenean foothills,

chases through the valley bottom.

It will broaden across the Magnoac

Plateau and flow into the Garronne,

and so into the Bay of Biscay,

Bizkaiko Golkoa in Basque – a gulf

of legendary storms and shipwrecks.

 

Impervious, as yet, to the almost

all determining past, she has found

a clayey puddle. She stamps and jumps.

The rich, pearly water rejoices.

 

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