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Holyhead

POETRY

TRAVELLERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read244 views

As we walk beside the wide estuary

we follow a wheatear as it waits for us

on the embankment of the rough causeway

then bobs and flits from stone to stone as we near,

enticing us, flashing its white rump,

which is pure white like an egret’s feathers.

 

We watch the tide beneath the low viaducts

begin to rise. On tracks Stephenson built

the London-Holyhead train crosses,

passes close to Edward’s grey castle walls.

Waders are gathering on the mudflats –

curlews, red shanks, egrets – denizens,

immigrants. This bird, which led us from its nest

among the embankment’s crevices, will

winter in Africa.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Ian Craine: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.1K views

I’ve known David for a very long time. We were at school together, King’s School, Chester. We weren’t close then, four of five years apart, a huge difference at that age. David, the elder of us, wrote shimmering poems for the School Magazine, full as I recall of Greek mythology and other allusions. I was very impressed. It’s no exaggeration to say that David Selzer is one of the major influences on my becoming a writer of sorts myself. Though I knew him he would not at that stage have known of me. That came later, first around the bar of Chester Little Theatre, and again much later when I discovered this site. By then I had written half a dozen screenplays for cinema, as well as a number of poems, short stories, flash fiction and life writing. Novels remain beyond me. But here’s a small selection of the shorter pieces.

 

1) PANAMA REACHES: Life Writing – the title of the piece will become clear in the reading. This is a farrago of things that have interested me in my long life, things I have experienced, and over which I have pondered. There is a gossamer thin linking thread almost hidden within the seemingly arbitrary diversions.

 

2) POET DYING: Short Story – at its core a sad tale but with some fun and games along the way. A tale for all those who have spent too much time drinking in pubs at four o’clock in the afternoon when only the committed foregather.

 

3) SEVENTH CHILD: Poem – my variation on an old trope, this one perhaps about (authors not always being the best interpreters of their output) parental affection and intimacy in a less fluent time.

 

4) PALIMPSESTS: Poem – this was written to order for a Holyhead writing group as part of a project linking various ports on either side of the Irish Sea. Towards the end I fear it becomes a little boastful about the place, like a town crier in the marketplace. But poems are written for various audiences, and this, a recent exercise, confirmed at least that I could still string portentous words together – and at speed. No mental lingerings as with the others – this was turned around from concept to full realisation within 24 hours.

 

©Ian Craine 2023

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AT ROSCOLYN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

Caernavon Bay is below, and to the west

the Irish Sea. The restive winds and waves

are lulled now to a breath, to a swell.

In the distance the London-Holyhead train

crosses the causeway. A multi-decked ferry

from Dublin is entering the harbour.

 

After the Druids hid, and the Romans left,

there came a multitude of saints, mostly

martyrs, not infrequently princesses,

renowned in death for healing the heart’s anguish.

St Gwenfaen – ‘Blessed White Rock’ – was one such.

Roscolyn’s plain parish church dominates

the high ground where her cloistered cell had been.

 

Someone has put a bench outside the churchyard,

perhaps for those returning from the saint’s well

on the headland, their torment gone, abated.

The dry stone walls and sheep-grazed fields stretch

in a soundless haze this kind summer evening.

 

 

 

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POETRY

HOLYHEAD BREAKWATER COUNTRY PARK

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K 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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POETRY

THE AQUEDUCT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

At the bottom of the valley – here briefly
more gorge than valley – the ice age river
runs white and rapid. Deep in its narrow banks
rest the vast brick columns of the aqueduct
that carries, in a narrow cast iron canal,
one hundred and twenty seven feet above,
water from the river tapped upstream –
Thomas Telford’s genius, recognised
as one with the Statue of Liberty,
the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis
and become a stop for Japanese tourists.

Above the valley along the toll road
Telford built from Holyhead to London
is the scattered village developed and named
for the aqueduct – Froncysyllte* –
of a thousand souls at its zenith.

On the war memorial by the roadside
there are thirty six names – the first two
from the Boer War. Two small plaques list
the World War dead – and, between them, an ornate,
tiled drinking fountain (now dry) for the lads
lost on the high veld, one in battle,
the other from typhoid. The legend is
Parcher Y Dewr – ‘respect the brave’.
By chance or design, you would have had to
bow your head, when, at the turn of a tap,
the waters from ancient volcanoes
would spring into your mouth.

 

*Pronounced: Vron-cuss-ulth-teh.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SOLITARY ANGLER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

The fog bell sounds every thirty seconds.
A shag bobs in the swell by the lighthouse
painted black and white with the legend
‘No Passage Landwards’ on its east and west sides.
An occasional heavy wave thumps the beach.

I climb the high bank of sea-smoothed pebbles
from the landward side and hear and feel them
chafe and slip. At the seaward foot of the mound –
a petrified wave three times my height –
an angler stands, motionless, his rod propped
on a tripod, the line taut in the tide.
And the bell sounds twice every minute.

On the island, a quarter mile away,
are cormorant, guillemot, razorbill.
On the horizon, tankers are waiting
to berth at Holyhead on the high tide.

He is watching the line, I presume,
ready for the slightest twitch to pull in
whatever it is his optimism
has prepared him for. The island has housed
a monastery, a sanctuary,
a telegraph station – now elder thrives
and puffins flourish on Puffin Island
or Priestholm or Ynys Seriol.
Every half minute, the lighthouse bell sounds.

I have my own fish to catch. This place,
whatever the weathers, inspires, inspires:
it is the end of land and the sea’s start,
under a sky always open, immense
but its compass points known beneath rocks
unchanged, a fifty year pilgrimage.

He is still watching the line when I leave
climbing the steep bank of worked pebbles.
And the bell sounds, and sounds…

 

 

 

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