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Hesperides

POETRY

SAINT COLUMBA AND THE CURLEWS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.2K views

If I were obliged to chose a patron saint

it might be Columba – his Irish name

Colmkill, Dove of the Churchyard. He was

a poet, a scholar, a missionary

to the Western Isles, and all of Scotia.

 

So what had drawn him to Christianity

on the far Celtic edge of Europe?

One god? Redemption? Or the hieratic

Latin manuscripts he had learned to read –

long after the empire of Ancient Rome

had imploded west of Byzantium?

 

He had studied, I am sure, the sunlit groves

of the Hesperides, and would dream, when days

lengthened into gentler nights, and warmer,

summer winds blew from the distant south,

of bird-thronged orchards lush with golden apples –

but always heard the curlews calling

along the dark and glittering shore.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HESPERIDES

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

As goldfinches begin to sing and sparrows

chirp in polyphony, and swallows,

martins, swifts hunt with grace, the palette

of attenuated gold, amber, rose

is layered along the sea’s horizon

and the sun becomes a perfect disk

in the filtering, vermilion haze.

Anonymous con trails criss-cross the compass.

A lone swimmer crawls across the bay.

 

The evening star, sudden as a lamp, glints

in the afterglow. A wispy rain cloud forms

and drifts away like smoke. Somewhere a peacock calls

then, elsewhere, a donkey brays – ridiculous

and sublime, like figures in a masque.

A fishing boat, its stern light lit, leaves harbour

to anchor in the shelving deep and cast its nets.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE PROMONTORY

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

At the landward end of the bronze age site

is a six storey apartment hotel;

right a broad sandy beach with amenities,

left, behind palms, cypresses and olives,

another hotel, vast as a cruise ship,

hiding the property development signs

in Russian and Chinese on the main road.

 

A peloton of young German students,

when we arrive, is being lectured

at the entrance to the museum –

an architect-designed, circular space,

subtly engineered into the sandstone,

with a green dome and copper plated doors.

A Cypriot copper oxhide ingot

is one of the exhibits. They were standard

in weight – and shaped always like a stretched

animal skin – throughout the eastern sea.

 

Precursors of the fictional Ulysses,

exiles, refugees from Mycenae

found this safe haven – with its thirty foot

sandstone cliffs and a fresh water spring

and its crow’s nest view of the sea, north to Troy,

south to Egypt, west to the Hesperides –

three thousand years ago. They survived pirates,

a fire, built defensive walls, stone houses,

but stayed for only two generations

before Hellenising the island,

exploiting its copper.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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