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Limestone

THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD

The ruined, twelfth century limestone chapel

is Grade II Listed and the land owned

by the Welsh Assembly otherwise

it would have been converted into

somebody’s desirable holiday home

with views south through the empty windows

to woods and north down the moor’s sheep-cropped slope

across the sweeping, wind-surfing bay.

 

Who built the original chapel –

and the small side chapel with a vault

in the sixteenth century – or for what

specific purpose no one now knows.

For a time, in the eighteenth century,

local gentry used the place for private worship

then left it to the wind and their sheep.

The roof has gone and a boundary wall.

 

Maybe the original builders

hoped St Patrick would be wrecked again,

this time on the bay’s deceiving rocks –

had the altar ready for him to dispense

the body and the blood, to preach the faith

of fear and guilt in that hieratic tongue.

‘Peccantem me quotidie…Timor

mortis conturbat me..Deus, salva me.’

 

Not far from the chapel and next to the road

to the shore is a limestone cromlech,

its twenty five ton capstone placed on eight

two metre megaliths – each a metre in the earth –

perhaps five thousand years ago, and aligned,

like the chapel, more or less east and west,

and as enigmatic. We know nothing –

names, number – of the people buried there.

 

‘The fear of death confounds…’ Their remains

are catalogued in some museum

along with the pottery shards found by them.

A small child, a girl of five or so,

is flying a kite. It flutters noisily

like a prayer flag or a temporal banner

above the scant, abandoned chapel

and the emptied cromlech.

 

 

 

 

WATCHING THE LAMBS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read473 views

From the Ackermans’ seat near the lift bridge
on the Llangollen Canal – tree-lined
for the most part but open here – the view
has become a perennial favourite.
We watch cyclists, joggers, walkers pass,
and the narrow boats that have journeyed
from Nantwich, Dudley, Worcester – and we nod and smile.
But best of all in late March/early April
are the lambs on the pasture opposite
that rises, with occasional oaks,
gently to an escarpment that ends
beneath high limestone cliffs that sever the sky.

This part of Wales was once near the South Pole –
and has variously been: deep-sea mud,
crumpled, fractured by the movements of the earth;
a shallow, fertile tropical sea;
a swamp with giant mosses; a vast, hot,
featureless desert inundated by the odd
flash flood; an ice sheet shaping the landscape.
All gone in the shake of a lamb’s tail…

The ewes chop grass as if they were on piece work.
Their offspring thrust at them for milk or stare
at something new or lounge in the sun
or explore the barbed wire edges of our,
oh, so temporary world.

 

 

 

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AN AVIARY

Under a steel net – sponsored by a multi-

national – in a disused limestone quarry

were all of South Africa’s birds, except

the predators.

 

The black warden softly extolled the aviary’s

human values: calm, peace, gentleness.

How well he knew each of the inhabitants:

who delved, wove, fluttered, chattered, nested,

hatched, fed – and defended abundantly.

 

At home, damp autumn turned to cold winter,

birds pecked at the ice on the stilled fountain

and the coalition of the willing

prepared for war.

DINAS BRÂN, LLANGOLLEN

'Castell Dinas Bran', Richard Wilson, circa 1771



The path zigzags upwards to the keep, like

smoke or a hare hounded. Magpies lowfly

the gorse, bank to a clump of pine, barks pink

as coral. Ravens wheel. Birds and the wind

disdain the ruins peasants carted, raised,

razed and thieved. Before allegiances, walls

was this hill, that vast, limestone precipice

and, everywhere, silent, ancient waters.

Whoever sees the turf worn with walkers’

traffic and earth’s crust shining, whoever

looks across the vanished sea to the cliff’s

myriad catacombs will imagine the hoe

snick in the furrow, the clangour of arms

and the chough’s triumphant croak.

Defenders,  tousled on the battlements,

watched fields sown, leaves fall, expected Saxons.

Foes were covert. A viaduct terminates

the valley and trim, mechanical

dynasties converge on the smoky plain.

The journey from Powys to the Five Towns

was all of sixteen leagues, as ravens fly,

a thousand years and such optimism.