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Romanesque

AMAZING GRACE

By David SelzerMay 26, 20170 Comments1 min read1.5K views

From my desk I can see the Methodist Church

opposite, built during the first quarter

of the last century entirely by subscription,

with its decorative buttresses, Welsh slate roof

and faux Romanesque leaded windows.

If the doors are open and the wind is right

I can hear opening chords on the organ

and ‘How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.’

I watch the congregation age and the hearse

draw up – modest folk, worthily dressed,

not averse to jumble sales and laughter.

When the sky is cloudless and the sun is setting

over Liverpool Bay the rays shine through

one set of windows, the body of the church,

another set and illuminate

me – for half a minute – ‘…but now am found,

was blind, but now I see.’

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By David Selzer

AT PEAK’S POND, GUILDFORD CASTLE

By David SelzerMay 26, 20170 Comments1 min read1.4K views

The castle was one of the first the Normans built.

Its earthen motte rises some fifty feet

or so above this late Victorian pond –

the keep, with its Romanesque windows,

built from local golden Bargate stone and strips

of knapped flint for decoration, fifty more.

As yet she is innocent of all that –

only what moves, makes noise, can be held, climbed

or eaten: like the lemon drizzle cake

a pair of lovers offers her; like the steps

by the pond she ascends and descends;

its railings; the quack-quacks; a helicopter;

the solar powered fountains, whose comings

and goings she points at excitedly.

And the people, who all, multi-ethnic,

cross-generational, reciprocating or not,

deserving or otherwise, receive

a pristine smile and a disarming wave

from within these ramparts.

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By David Selzer

VALLE CRUCIS, LLANTYSILIO, LLANGOLLEN

By David SelzerAugust 29, 20121 Comment1 min read1.8K views

nlw_nlw_gcf02184_624x544 — Valle Crucis Abbey, Richard Wilson, circa 1760

Where willow stoops in curling shallows, May

stirs branches that creak like rigging or rub

like silk. The cuckoo sings its unsettling,

solemn roundelay. Sun gilds the abbey’s

west wall. The glassless rose window is a

blinded eye in a Romanesque skull –

indulgence in a wilderness. The Blood of

the Lamb coursed through the old ways of Keltoi,

Celtae, Celts. Time the dissembler leaches

the earth of language, artefact, intent.

A wall in the south transept was scorched by mishap

or mayhem. Dousing the flames, did the monks

break their vow? The Reformation empowered

even Trappists. Rulers destroy or endow

for glory. Defenders of parliament

effaced the cross (placed on a pagan mound)

carved to honour the Princes of Powys.

Even at the world’s furthest edge, even

beside an unkempt road through a valley,

was always a junction of opposites –

the classic, classical dichotomies

of the cerebellum and the soul, of

carapace and substance, tyranny and

learning. An oak tree, shaped like a brain, spins

the sun’s threads and is cleft, halved – fire and leaf.

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By David Selzer

ANGEL OF THE NORTH

By David SelzerJuly 23, 20120 Comments1 min read1.4K views

At my back is Durham’s Romanesque

Te Deum. I turn my face to the sky

and this wonder – forged in a commonwealth

of system, iron and grace by private

genius out of public patronage,

on the grassed remains of a pithead baths.

Wherever you are in its vicinity,

in its line of sight, you can look nowhere else –

at its span, its height, it wings; at the

uncompromising power, unambiguous

vitality. When you look directly,

it is earthed but ready to soar – from your eye’s

corner, just about to take off or land.

It is rusting, except where children sliding

have polished its feet. It seems naturally

an ‘it’, not androgynous and neither

female nor male. It seems like the solar wind,

a flood tide, a stand of birches, winding gear,

a lathe, a mould. I read the graffiti;

note the engineers’ marks; count the rivets;

conjure the subtle, oh, gentle throb

of enormous wing beats; feel the skill,

the grasp, the joy; imagine the steady

tremor of turbines. Celebrating life,

prefiguring death, this weighty messenger,

this kind harbinger, welded like a ship’s

hull, embraces the air.

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By David Selzer