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ice age

POETRY

LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read195 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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POETRY

CILAN UCHAF

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

From a grassy cliff top, shorn by sheep and wind,

at the Llyn Peninsula’s southern most tip,

we can see across North Cardigan Bay

to Harlech and the heights of Snowdonia,

stretching east to Bala, south beyond Barmouth,

north far beyond Porthmadog. Below

are gulls silent in the thermals – beneath them,

a sickle-shaped cove of sand and shingle.

The ancient place name translates, ‘Highest Chamber’.

 

Through a gate, beside a fishermen’s path,

in some farmer’s field is an unsignposted,

small neolithic burial chamber,

looted aeons ago, of course, but its vast

capstone and the smaller uprights, though slipped

a little, too long ago to be remembered,

are effectively in place. Whether the stones

were already nearby – ice age detritus –

or had to be hauled from afar, someone

thought life mattered enough to acknowledge death

with a major piece of engineering.

 

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POETRY

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.5K 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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