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Irish sea

POETRY

SS LUSITANIA ON HER SEA TRIALS 1907

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read705 views

An amateur photographer was lucky

enough, or sufficiently patient,

to catch the Clydebank-made Lusitania

from a sheep-cropped Anglesey headland

– with her four funnels, six decks for passengers,

the hidden glistening luxury

of a grand hotel – on her sea trials

in the Irish Sea. The transatlantic route

was a lucrative race between the British

and the Germans – part of the long proxy war

before the War itself. The Admiralty

subsidised Cunard to build the steamer.

 

Eight years later, a U-boat sank her,

eleven miles off the Kinsale Lighthouse

in County Cork. All fifteen hundred perished.

There was justification, and outrage.

The USA entered the Great War.

Though a salvageable wreck, she is deemed

dangerous. The hold contains munitions.

 

The postcard size print is out of focus

and the day is misty, but the four funnels

are unmistakable.

 

 

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POETRY

SALMON LEAP

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read315 views

An aged busker in a stetson sets up

on the river embankment near the café.

He talks at length about his life, then sings

Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’.

The weary crowd applauds sporadically.

We walk towards the weir, where brown-tinted

helter-skelter roaring iridescent spume

catches the sunlight. We remember

when the salmon – from the North Atlantic

through the Irish Sea – leapt steps by the weir,

homing upstream in their birth river

to spawn. Industrial effluent released

continually has destroyed that.


A cormorant – one of a gulp that clusters

near the weir – dives, leaving only bubbles,

and emerges, an endangered eel

writhing in its beak.

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POETRY

AT ROSCOLYN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read441 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

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read560 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

THE BRIDGE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read614 views

Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,

between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build

his one span suspension bridge, high enough

for tall ships to pass. The two towers,

exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks

from the Penmon quarries on the coast

north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built

from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin

to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.

 

Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared

in penury – a stone mason by trade,

a self-taught engineer, begetter of

the A5 coaching road, erstwhile Watling Street;

the London-Holyhead trunk from Marble Arch

to Admiralty Arch by the Irish Sea.

 

Built a generation later, a mile south

and within sight, is Stephenson’s railway bridge.

Two British industrial colossi

so close in space and time! So much investment,

ingenuity, innovation, to keep

the Catholic colonies of Ireland,

those reserves of navvies and wheat, in thrall!

 

Between the bridges are The Swellies

around Fish Trap Island – Ynys Gorad Goch –

whirling at high tide, lake calm at low water.

The Druids, deemed Rome’s enemies, were hunted.

They crossed here in coracles, felt safe at last

on Ynys Môn, Mam Cymru.  They watched the soldiers

swim like dogs across the sacred waters.

Rome’s mercenaries ran them down like boar,

skewering them among the flowering gorse.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CITY AND THE RIVER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read459 views

From Woodside to the Pier Head by ferry

is a mile and a bit on waters

that smell always of mud and oil. Eastwards

is Overton Hill, the sandstone ridgeway –

westwards the Liverpool Bar Lightship,

Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea,

and, far, far beyond, the widening

Atlantic skies where the weathers are made.

 

The Saxons named the river – a boundary

between kingdoms –  the Vikings the place,

with their numerous settlements on the heights.

Cotton and molasses and slavery

laid its Victorian foundations –

avenues, mansions, slums, alleyways –

a city of barbarism and grandeur.

 

My grandmother told her stories as

a litany of parables, wonders.

Each July 12th, the Green and the Orange

brawled murderously. Her father captained

a ‘coffin ship’ to Boston – her mother

took to drink. Johnny Flaws, a neighbour,

died in Arizona. Other neighbours

rushed from their houses for Armageddon –

others flitted late at night or early dawn.

The Cast Iron Shore at the Dingle was rust red

with residue from the scrapped, beached hulls.

 

Many decades ago, when the river

thronged with craft and was polluted, ships,

at midnight each New Year, would blow their horns,

for five minutes or more – a raggedy

wind ensemble of strangers wishing

strangers well. Now, in summer, the docks throng

with translucent, pink-tinged Moon Jellyfish.

 

 

 

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