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Irish sea

POETRY

AMONG WINTRY REEDS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read498 views

Among wintry reeds not far from the horizon –

where mountain rain water and ocean brine,

the Dee and the Irish Sea, become one –

is a large, white, upturned hull, storm-wrecked

from its moorings in Connah’s Quay, perhaps,

certainly abandoned for twelve month and more,

too costly, maybe, to salvage. Such

a motley of flotsam: rusting buoys;

splintered pieces of superstructure;

frayed strands of nautical rope scattered

like serpents through the wetlands’ runnels;

decomposing in the teeming marshland

this sunny, January afternoon.

 

The light has gone in the west over the hills.

The chattering in the hidden lagoons

among marshland reeds has almost ceased.

Returning from the stubble fields inland

thousands and thousands of pink-footed geese,

collegiate in flight, were black and calling

against the westering sun. Now – migrants,

wintering from the Arctic islands: Iceland,

Greenland, Novaya Zemlya, Svalbard –

they are roosting in silent communes.

 

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POETRY

WEATHERS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read4.1K views

A south westerly is blowing loose curtains

of rain across the bay like drifts of mist.

The horizon has been long gone, and with it

the silhouettes of fossil fuel platforms

in the Irish Sea off the North Wales coast.

 

By late afternoon the weather has changed

with the tides. Sun lights the disused works

on the far headland, and the vicissitudes

of Amlwch’s fortunes – copper mines then shipyards.

 

Large, low clouds pass slowly, elegantly –

like fluffy, misshapen dirigibles.

At dusk, on the easterly horizon,

the platforms’ orange lights gleam. As night falls

the sky clears of cloud, and there is only

blackness, and the untold stars in their pristine,

unlettered disarray.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SS LUSITANIA ON HER SEA TRIALS 1907

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.2K 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 Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.5K 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 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

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K 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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