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weathers

THE STORM

In the old stone house above the harbour,

however well sealed the windows are

against the rain and the wind, squalls invade

the chimneys and blow in the empty hearths.

The lamp at the end of the quay still shines

despite the waves spilling over the wall

and agitating the tethered lobster creels.

 

A surge douses the light – but wild clouds part

and a full moon shines on a sea running high.

Abruptly the turbulent clouds close –

and there is only a low roar, an

erratic buffeting of wind and rain,

and the wailing in the dark hearths. Absence

echoes in the blackness of each bare room.

 

In the pallid dawn there is no one now

to see the tumbled creels on the quay,

the lamp’s broken glass, the empty harbour,

the cormorants and the kittiwakes

flying out across a cloud grey sea –

or to conjure songs about the weathers made

beyond the horizon.

 

 

 

THE SAME SHARED GROUND

Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

 

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one. Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.

 

 

 

THE SAME SHARED GROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read585 views
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © Sylvia Selzer 2009.


Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

 

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one. Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.