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Porth Llechog

WEATHERS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read4.3K 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.

 

 

 

 

ON THE NATURE OF BUTTERFLIES

Before I even enter the room I hear

the fluttering of tiny gossamer wings.

A butterfly appears to be hoping

that the window glass, at some point, will become

empty air. I fetch a tumbler, and place it

cautiously over the creature, which stills

as I lift it away and cover the top

with my palm. I can see now the butterfly

is a Painted Lady – that ubiquitous

migrant from North Africa – with its

variegated wings of black, brown, ochre,

olive and red, the subtlest of dazzles.

 

As if it were a primed grenade or rare,

exquisite crystal I carry the tumbler

circumspectly to the balcony.

The butterfly flies up, out, and not,

as I would have anticipated, hoped,

over jagged rocks and ragged seaweed

towards the meticulous horizon

across the bay – where a white hulled ketch

is anchoring, its starboard light pale

in the falling dusk – but back, over the roof,

where, out of sight, beyond a dry stone wall,

a wild bank rises of rosebay willowherb,

convolvulus and bracken, effulgent

beneath darkening sycamores and oaks.

 

 

 

 

PORTH LLECHOG

The place name is frequently translated as

‘sheltered bay’, and so it is this hour

as she studies the fresh, pellucid rock pools

the last tide left; gently nets creatures trapped

and waiting – two small crabs and a shrimp –

and holds them up to the air briefly to marvel

at their peculiar uniqueness; returns them,

watching while they hide. She is hardly a child,

not entirely a child. She is tall and lithe

and svelte and supple; a girl gradually

becoming a woman; somewhere already

on that swift journey that seems to take

forever; somewhere on the margins

of childhood and adulthood – like the shore line

the tide is beginning to shift. And ‘porth’

can mean ‘portal’ or ‘gateway’, and ‘llech’

can mean ‘rock’, ‘og’ ‘harrow’, which better suits

the long furrows the endless tides have made

in these rocks, layered with golden seaweed,

during the last five hundred and fifty

million years or so,  and amongst which

she still crouches, net poised.