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The Groves

THEMES

THEMES: THE RIVER DEE, CHESTER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read399 views

This is the second post in this category, one which brings together poems with a connecting theme.

The Dee, which rises in North Wales and enters Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea through the vast Dee Estuary, flows through the city of Chester in North West England. There is a  stretch of the river – no longer perhaps than a third of a mile – that flows past a tree-lined embankment called The Groves. The titles and opening lines of all of the poems inspired by that stretch are listed in alphabetical order. Please click on the title to read the whole poem.

 

CORMORANTS

In the driest months when the tidal river

is low and the current almost lethargic,

when the waters flow gently over the weir

the Normans built to create a fish pool…

 

COURAGE

In the stretch from here to where the river bends

around the meadows, there have been drownings –

…A children’s cancer charity has fastened

awareness-raising memento mori

to the railings of a suspension footbridge…

 

SALMON LEAP

An aged busker in a Stetson sets up

on the river embankment near the café.

He talks at length about his life, then sings

Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’…

 

THE BANDSTAND

Beside the city’s  river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands…

 

THE CYBER DEAD

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley…

 

THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING

Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs

and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.

William the Conqueror, in winter,

force-marched his army over the Pennines

to reach the river and waste the town…

 

THE GROVES

We are sitting on a bench in a peaceful

place popular even on a winter’s day

now lockdown has been eased. This tree-lined

terraced embankment beside the river…

 

THE RIVER

This river, deeper than most in metaphor,

abundantly fluent in simile,

is in spate…

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE BANDSTAND

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read413 views

Beside the city’s river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands.

Since the pandemic it has been silent,

and empty except for an occasional

escaped toddler pattering across its floor,

their brief glee echoing from its roof.

 

Someone is sleeping rough in the bandstand

in a red sleeping bag. Though it is late

morning he or she still seems asleep.

Probably the last they heard of the night,

before they slept, was the river’s soft passing.

Perhaps the distant siren is not for them.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE CYBER DEAD

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read684 views

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley. I walked beneath the lime trees,

along the embankment. The brown river

swirled in spate, high with rains from the remnants

of Atlantic storms breaking on shorn

and distant mountains. I thought of those dead friends –

their social media accounts intestate –

forever alive, and orbiting

eternally in cyber space, so close

yet still and always forlornly ‘Knock-knock-

knockin’ on Heaven’s door’.

 

 

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POETRY

THE GROVES

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

For Matt Baker

We are sitting on a bench in a peaceful

place popular even on a winter’s day

now lockdown has been eased. This tree-lined

terraced embankment beside the river –

with a bandstand and moorings for pleasure boats –

was commissioned by one of the city’s

Victorian worthies at his own expense

to match the elegant pedestrian

suspension bridge built by a developer.


If we sit here long enough with our take-out

hot chocolates and toasted sandwiches –

counting the passersby wearing masks –

someone we know may saunter past with their dog.

Here there used to be a whiteness of swans,

but a flock of panhandling black-headed gulls,

squawkily scrambling for the odd dry crust,

has, as it were, elbowed out the large mute birds.


When the Roman mercenaries built the camp

on the sandstone bluff behind us, when barques

from Anjou docked downstream with cargoes

of wine and spices, the air, like now,

was multi-lingual. We can hear snatches

of French and Polish, Greek and Arabic.


If we sit here long enough late winter’s

high tide may rise, as now, over the weir,

and begin to cover the embankment’s steps,

propelling various bosky flotsam

upstream at a proverbial rate of knots,

with a couple of mallards and a moorhen

floating past on a wizened trunk the size

of an alligator from the bayous.

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