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Llandudno

POETRY

STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Five men, in orangey yellow overalls,

using long handled rollers are painting

the paddling pool – which is the size of four

tennis courts – that blue which only colour charts

show or astronauts will see.  Beyond

is the limestone headland with rock-roses

amongst the scrub and fulmars nesting.

Far out to sea is a gathering,

stately and serried, of white, wind turbines.

 

I think of David Hockney’s iconic pools,

and of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ –

hybrids of sculpture and paint  – and his ‘Jammers’ –

unvarnished poles and coloured canvas.

 

Uniformed artisans – artificers

of the imagination – these painters

each year layer this surreal blue. Sea water

fades it, and tiny feet.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LEVITICUS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

As we travelled back from a London weekend

in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express

three very young, head scarved mothers nursed

their newborns and chattered softly all the way.

At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.

 

Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,

Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,

is a three storey detached house whose ground floor

has been a synagogue for a century

and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.

Above the shul, to facilitate

a minyan, are holiday apartments.

 

In summer months there are pop-up kosher shops

and activities. Families stroll along

the promenade – the men, black suited,

with trimmed or untrimmed beards, fedoras

or keppels, some with earlocks – past the strident

evangelicals by the bandstand.

 

What would the Lubavitcher Rebbes –

during their century of solitude

in the shetl among the darkening forests

and the gorging marshes of Belarus,

who only knew of oceans from God’s words –

have made of Jews, their Jews, sauntering

beneath the sun and beside the sea no less,

safely and kosherly among the goyim!

 

Somewhere among the streets below the Orme

is the six week post-partum retreat

the new mothers were travelling to

with their unknown futures.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT THE END OF THE PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,

and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,

Country & Western Memorabilia,

Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;

past the sustainable hardwood benches

with withered in memoriam bouquets;

over the planking with its measured gaps

through which to view, like a bioscope,

the incoming tide shimmy then shake

the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,

slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;

next to where even the line fishermen

are starting to stow their gear, as an east wind

begins to blow, is the Mariner’s Lounge

with its faux fishing nets, its mounted

plastic cod, its framed chart of the North Wales coast.

 

Those Tinsel and Turkey pensioners

adventurous enough to leave their hotels –

crescented along the town’s North Shore –

are sipping, with the odd Walkers’ crisp,

a Rombout’s coffee, a Gallo chardonnay,

a Carling, a Guinness, and watching

Hollywood tv repeats in HD

as sudden rain squalls against the glass.

 

Oh, to be transported warmly, safely,

to Beverly Hills – via Mulholland Drive

and Santa Monica Boulevard –

where, to portentous chords, perfect mysteries

are perfectly solved by pensionable folk!

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in 2016.

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POETRY

AT THE END OF THE PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,

and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,

Country & Western Memorabilia,

Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;

past the sustainable hardwood benches

with withered in memoriam bouquets;

over the planking with its measured gaps

through which to view, like a bioscope,

the incoming tide shimmy then shake

the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,

slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;

next to where even the line fishermen

are starting to stow their gear, as an east wind

begins to blow, is the Mariner’s Lounge

with its faux fishing nets, its mounted

plastic cod, its framed chart of the North Wales coast.

 

Those Tinsel and Turkey pensioners

adventurous enough to leave their hotels –

crescented along the town’s North Shore –

are sipping, with the odd Walkers’ crisp,

a Rombout’s coffee, a Gallo chardonnay,

a Carling, a Guinness, and watching

Hollywood tv repeats in HD

as sudden rain squalls against the glass.

 

Oh, to be transported warmly, safely,

to Beverly Hills – via Mulholland Drive

and Santa Monica Boulevard –

where, to portentous chords, perfect mysteries

are perfectly solved by pensionable folk!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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