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Norsemen

POETRY

AT WORLD’S END

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read597 views

For Tricia Durdey

 

As she walked up the muddy, overgrown path –

a path that was sometimes beside the river

in white-water spate from a night of rain,

and sometimes through the oak woods, leaves falling

gently as if choreographed – she thought

despairingly of events half the world

away, the rights and wrongs of ancient horrors,

modern outrage. When she reached the summit

there was World’s End: a ruined chapel.

A crow flew up noisily from what

might have been the altar. From crevices

in the tumbled walls ferns grew, and moss

covered the floor’s broken paving stones –

a seemingly romantic, gothic folly.

Local legend had berserk Norsemen slaughter

Celtic Christian families hiding in the chapel,

and set the oaken roof-beams alight.

 

She began to descend, thinking how easy

the legend made choosing the right side,

the side of goodness, and kindness, of hope

not despair, however much such a choice

was a considered act of faith and balance –

like walking downhill on that muddy path

safely beside the tumbling river.

Suddenly she thought we are more than our lives,

and smiled at such mystical metaphysics,

but said out loud, ‘Yes, we are more than our lives’.

 

 

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POETRY

ON LITTLE EYE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read517 views

Only the highest tides reach this small island’s

sandstone rocks. A collar of flaxen sand

surrounds it. A quarter of a mile north

is Middle Eye. A hundred yards further

is Hilbre, habitation of hermits,

custom’s officers, weather stations.

These three are rugged, stony outcrops

in the mouth of the estuary.

 

Leaving West Kirby’s suburban promenade,

we had walked, at low water, to Little Eye

across the Dee’s hard, striated sands.

Westward is Wales, and the redundant lighthouse

at Point of Ayr, and, beyond and looming,

Llandudno’s Great Orme like the dragon’s head

the Norsemen named it for. Here is the earth’s

sweep, our planet’s generous curve and grasp.

 

Nearer, on West Hoyle Bank, a colony

of maybe thirty, forty grey seals

has hauled out, dark shapes only at this distance –

their calls plaintive as gulls’, chesty, guttural.

In the channel between – filling with tide –

two kite surfers skim noisily into sight.

The giant sails swell, billow, with chancy air.

The seals begin to stir. We are tiny

on the arc of the world.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read549 views

In an ex-pat’s yard – Flemish or Dutch

the name on the gate suggests – the guinea fowl

panic. Two Booted Eagles are circling

down the valley from the ancient forest

of verdant oaks and chestnuts, sectoring

the yellow fields of maize and sunflowers

toward Monléon Magnoac, a village

now but once, before the Black Death, a new town

on a fortified hill top, one of more

than a thousand to soothe the wilderness

of Aquitaine, Languedoc and, here, Gascony

then English aka Norman crown estate.

Yet this was Basque country long before Norsemen

sailed through the Bosporus or up the Volga.

 

Northern Europeans have returned

as tax paying owner occupiers

rather than liege lords – an irony

which nobody appears to acknowledge.

 

After a night of rain, the river Gers,

rising in the Pyrenean foothills,

chases through the valley bottom.

It will broaden across the Magnoac

Plateau and flow into the Garronne,

and so into the Bay of Biscay,

Bizkaiko Golkoa in Basque – a gulf

of legendary storms and shipwrecks.

 

Impervious, as yet, to the almost

all determining past, she has found

a clayey puddle. She stamps and jumps.

The rich, pearly water rejoices.

 

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