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Greenland

POETRY

LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read457 views

Just beyond the redundant sandstone seawall

a stonechat flies from reed to reed – golden now

for autumn – singing its brief notes with each flight.

In hidden lagoons among the reed beds

are thousands of migrants, pink-footed geese –

with their incessant, metallic chattering –

wintering from Greenland and from Iceland.

 

***

 

Swaddled we bask on a secluded bench

facing the westering sun, which glints

on the river’s one navigable channel

mercurial on the opposite bank.

Even in clear weather the far coast

is too distant to be detailed. Today’s

light haze obfuscates its hilly fields

and three small towns – except for a sixties

high-rise of slum-clearance social housing

that looms, eyeless, like a far off grave marker.

 

***

 

Out of some profound lake filled from mountain moors

an ice age made, the river rushes white,

over scattered glacial debris,

through a long, deep limestone vale, flows

past oak woods and stands of willows, edges

pastureland and industrial estates to shape

this vast estuarial landscape – that today

is gold and quicksilver.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

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

Before the marsh on the coastal plain was drained –

to turn the dark, rich glacial soil

into the broad fields of market gardens,

selling fresh produce south to the port city

burgeoning daily from mouth to mouth –

the mere was vast, eight square miles and more.

 

Family groups wandered the margins –

to fish, collect eggs, snare birds. Settlements

became hamlets, became villages:

cutting the reeds for thatching, cutting the peat

for cooking fires from the ice age bogland.

 

***

 

The long orangey-pink streaks of sun setting

over the Irish Sea turn the lake

from silver to pewter, and the birds

to cut-outs. A two carriage commuter train

crosses at the furthest edge, its windows

rectangles of bright yellow in the twilight –

as the watchers in the hides observe,

in a barely whispered wonderment,

thousands of pink-footed geese appear.

 

They are wintering here from the breeding grounds

in the mountains of Iceland and Greenland –

by day feeding on stubble fields, in the dusk

settling noisily on these dark waters

with their poignant, slightly throaty calls,

their myriad wings black in the fading light.

 

 

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POETRY

WINTERING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.2K views

Pink-footed geese are wintering on the marshes

west of here – flocks from Spitzbergen, Iceland,

Greenland. This late October morning

the garden is full of noises: the trimming

and shaping of hedges, bushes, trees,

the blowing and gathering of leaves –

and high cries as a skein flies eastwards

to feed on wheat stalks in the stubble fields.

 

The afternoon is disturbed by sirens –

not fire or police or ambulance.

There have been explosions somewhere north

we are informed – but all is well. At twilight,

as usual, directly overhead

the geese, in their centuries, return,

cries like ululations.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LAST REFUGE

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

 

‘Two bald men fighting over a comb…’ José Luis Borges

Almost always, winds blew – over heath and sheep.

Seas swelled southward – to ice, minerals.

Mapped, the islands seemed like green spume: a tattered

standard blown west. That bleak solitude

was Arthur Ransome country – The Camp,

Tumbledown Mountain – naive, single minded,

like the Falkland Flightless Steamer duck…

Larger than Greenland, smaller than India,

Argentina did not exist. Beyond

the cricket pitches was a wilderness

imagined, and illusive Indians

– ersatz Europe: anti-semitism

without chamber music.

HMS Ineludible sailed south,

Ward Room loud with rugby songs and Mess Deck

with obscenity. The glass was falling

and we were united in delusion.

The oligarchy of the point-to-point,

the clubhouse autocrats – stalking, for

decades, the welfare state – was seeking now

its last refuge. (Donkeys braying again

at the Menin Gate). Demagogues and

dockside farewells touched – a nation’s wishful,

seductive balm – like rhyming ‘liberty’

with ‘country’, ‘duty’, ‘butchery’. There were

real wounds and they festered.

And afterwards, on fenced-off heath, HMG

buried abandoned Argentine corpses

in some corner of andsoforth. Each cross

was patriotism’s benchmark: rejection

in defeat, in victory, a dutiful

compassion – or propaganda? Dead ground

marked the frontier between humanity

and cant. Widows from Rio Negro, mothers

from Buenos Aires were unlikely

to visit or invade.

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POETRY

WILDNESS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

 August ’91, the Gulf War over, Kuwaiti oilwells  almost saved,

Kurds beleaguered, Marsh Arabs gassed…

 

From Schipol’s Duty Free, slow with tourists,

to Immigration at O’Hare, slow with Croatian refugees,

seemed like a long day with an early start…

 

But for icebergs still loose and multiplying

along Greenland’s uncompromising coast,

the  tawny, unmarked  miles of tundra,

the empty, unpeopled miles…

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