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pink-footed geese

POETRY

AMONG WINTRY REEDS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read430 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

LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read690 views

Just beyond the redundant sandstone seawall

a stonechat flies from reed to reed – golden now

for autumn – singing its brief notes with each flight.

In hidden lagoons among the reed beds

are thousands of migrants, pink-footed geese –

with their incessant, metallic chattering –

wintering from Greenland and from Iceland.

 

***

 

Swaddled we bask on a secluded bench

facing the westering sun, which glints

on the river’s one navigable channel

mercurial on the opposite bank.

Even in clear weather the far coast

is too distant to be detailed. Today’s

light haze obfuscates its hilly fields

and three small towns – except for a sixties

high-rise of slum-clearance social housing

that looms, eyeless, like a far off grave marker.

 

***

 

Out of some profound lake filled from mountain moors

an ice age made, the river rushes white,

over scattered glacial debris,

through a long, deep limestone vale, flows

past oak woods and stands of willows, edges

pastureland and industrial estates to shape

this vast estuarial landscape – that today

is gold and quicksilver.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

WILD GEESE ABOVE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.2K views

I am standing at the kitchen sink stuffing

chicken thighs with sage and wrapping them

in prosciutto crudo, and am thinking

how much cooking and making poems

are analogous when I hear wild geese.

 

From the patio I see perhaps

half a dozen skeins, like strings of molecules,

flying towards the sunset, calling, calling.

They can see the shine of the marshes

they are homing to, and, if they knew it,

the darkening bulk of Halkyn Mountain

and, beyond, the pink-grey shimmering

of the Irish Sea. Suddenly, as evening

shades into night, blackbirds – territorial

as any gentry – in the birch tree,

and the plum, set up their warning rattle

at a neighbour’s cat, white as a cloud,

prowling behind the rhododendron.

 

I return to the kitchen, reflecting

on alarms and valedictions in

darkling gardens and still-bright skies – the sounds

a poem makes – and turn the oven on.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

WINTERING

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

Pink-footed geese are wintering on the marshes

west of here – flocks from Spitzbergen, Iceland,

Greenland. This late October morning

the garden is full of noises: the trimming

and shaping of hedges, bushes, trees,

the blowing and gathering of leaves –

and high cries as a skein flies eastwards

to feed on wheat stalks in the stubble fields.

 

The afternoon is disturbed by sirens –

not fire or police or ambulance.

There have been explosions somewhere north

we are informed – but all is well. At twilight,

as usual, directly overhead

the geese, in their centuries, return,

cries like ululations.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OF JOY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.5K views

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited…

The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy

 

I was standing at our front gate at twilight

with the people I love the most – wife,

daughter, granddaughter, each of them by turns

gossiping and bantering the way

some families do – beneath low, stormy clouds

still blush tinged from the westering sun

when we heard goose cries as if from all

compass points, and suddenly the first skein

appeared over the roof, and another,

and another, their cries echoing

throughout the skyey amphitheatre:

pink-footed geese from the Arctic Ocean’s margins

wintering among us.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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