Posts Tagged childhood
HERE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Garden, Hoole © SCES 2006
For more than half our lives, we have lived
in this enigmatic, anachronistic
Victorian villa – built to look like
a Georgian farmhouse – with ashlar blocks
at three corners, the fourth unfinished.
A Valentine’s Day removal, we ate
a takeaway in the kitchen with friends.
The wife is a widow now. Our daughter
has grown, gone and visits: her childhood
still blesses the rooms sun touches through the day’s
compass. We have watched, at the long sash window
on the half landing, the sky and the garden
change through the slow seasons -Â sparrows in flight,
a leaf falling. Love lasts.
THE SAME SHARED GROUND
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © SCES 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.
Recent Comments