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POETRY

ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read546 views

For Barbara and John Huddart

 

On this calm summer evening the North Sea falls

unheard on the wide sands below the castle

in whose inner ward the play is set – and we

(an eclectic collection of friends)

have brought folding chairs, prosecco, pop,

and fish suppers from Seahouses nearby

along this coast of raiders and saints.

 ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite,’

says Juliet, a canny lass – though all

four players are canny lasses in this

very British, outdoor, touring ‘tale of woe’.

 

In the interval the sun sets like fire,

a titian furnace stretched across The Borders,

out-performing any artifice –

and when, in the last act, beyond the charmed

arena of spots and floods, night falls

and the air chills, bats, out of ancient crevices,

flitter between the words and over the shore.

 

 

Note: See The Handlebards.

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POETRY

BAMBURGH

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read513 views

Driving to Scotland, via the North East,
to celebrate six months in a new job,
we stayed overnight in Durham to see
the romanesque, sandstone cathedral
with its relics of Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede,
denizens of Northumbria and its isles.
Next day, I saw a sign for Bamburgh –
somewhere I had visited in boyhood –
and suggested a detour off the A1.
We never made it over the border.

We drove down lanes lined with oak, ash, hawthorn,
and saw Bamburgh Castle against the sea,
resplendent on its volcanic outcrop
in a northern August afternoon sun,
centuries and epochs set in cut stone –
Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans –
knowing here was somewhere we should stop.

We could see the castle from our hotel room.
We walked St Aidan’s wide, sandy beach
to Beadnell’s gentle harbour and took a boat
from Seahouses to the Farne Islands
to see the colony of grey seals
basking on the bronze seaweed. A bumble bee
kept pace with the boat all of the way,
like us a wondering, wandering stranger.

We visited Lindisfarne Castle
and Holy Island, where Asian women,
in saris, on a coach trip sheltered
from the sea haar. We thought of the saints
and the Armstrongs, castle owners now
once arms kings, and Grace Darling, heroine
of Bamburgh and Wordsworth’s ‘A maiden
gentle…pious…pure, modest and yet so brave…’

It was good to go somewhere new – to
re-make love in the splendidly antwacky
hotel with Craster kippers large as plates;
on the windy beach; among the rustling dunes;
against the cold, cold sea.

 

 

 

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POETRY

PREPOSITIONS II

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read543 views

TO LINDISFARNE

From Seahouses to

Inner Farne, a bumble bee

escorted our boat.

OFF POINT OF AIR

In a far channel,

a lone boatmen plays the pipes:

‘The Road to the Isles’.

FROM HILBRE ISLAND

A pale summer’s day –

low tide, windless, infinite:

seals bark distantly.

ON YNYS LLANDDWYN

On summer’s last  day,

wind flecked wave crests arise, curl,

spill like quick-silver.

FROM THE MARITIME MUSEUM

Brown pelicans glide

freely, over Alcatraz,

like tawny galleons.

FROM GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE

Shouldering the wind, our

close shadows are stretched below

on the ribbed water.

ON SCREMERSTON BEACH, NEW YEAR’S DAY

In the dunes, a seal

was stranded – dissipating whisky

and resolve.

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