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Bethesda

ACROSS THE WATERS

By David SelzerOctober 21, 20160 Comments1 min read1.5K 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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By David Selzer

MERCY

By David SelzerMarch 20, 20152 Comments1 min read1.8K views

The now westering sun illuminates
the serried galleries of discarded slate.
There were once three thousand quarrymen
and ‘The Great Strike of Penrhyn’ – a three year
dispute. The owner, Baron Penrhyn,
built terraced houses with front gardens
for the few who had crossed the picket lines.
The first chapel was named ‘Bethesda’ (Hebrew
for ‘house of mercy’) – after the Roman bath,
near Jerusalem’s Sheep Gate, where ‘the man
was made whole and took his bed and walked.’
They named the slate town after the chapel.

As we drive on up the valley to the pass,
we can see, increasingly far below,
the river’s white waters and, suddenly,
three black horses skittish in the meadow
at the valley bottom, miniscule
like the woman in blue who walks towards them.

We pass a ruined cottage. ‘And thorns
shall come up in her palaces, nettles
and brambles in the fortresses thereof:
and it shall be an habitation
of dragons, and a court for owls.’ The height
of the mountains, the darkness of the lake
at the top of the pass, the size of boulders
the last ice age left are biblical.
Among distant ruins, we imagine,
too readily, both dragons and owls.
But we speak of the three black horses
and the woman in blue as a blessing.

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By David Selzer