Posts Tagged Ynys Mon
BULKELEY HOTEL, BEAUMARIS, YNYS MÔN
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 30th, 2009
At twilight from the hills across the Straits, a sudden
drift of smoke – then a fire’s deep orange eye blinked.
We talked of cruising the Nile; of moon rise and sun set,
of the narrow compass of the earth’s curve;
the river pilots’ open armed, hand-on-heart salaams;
and the stars rushing through the night.
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Later and sleepless in the early hours,
I kept watch at the bedroom window.
The hotel sign lit a faded Union flag,
threadbare at its outer edges.
The only hint of the far shore was
sporadic lights on the A55.
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But the stars were unequivocal. In a cloudless,
unpolluted sky, how they teemed!
I saw the constellations pass
and the random magnificence of things revealed.
Understandably, you preferred to sleep.
And journey safely through the dark.
BRYN CELLI DDU, YNYS MÔN
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on September 17th, 2009
This March day is replete with the bright warmth
of spring and ewes bleating for their lambs.
Cropped, walled grass rolls like a green, chequered sea.Â
The name translates: ‘Hillock of the black grove,
the dark cell’. The sacred trees have gone:
with the Druids, out-run by Rome’s legions;
and the wheat fields, which fed all of Cymru
before the Plantagenets came. High ground
and megalith survive:Â sign-posted, fenced.
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A passage of shale slabs opens on a round
chamber, holding this afternoon’s sun
like a child: stones dressed five thousand years ago
and angled exactly north east south west.
My fingers explore incisions that could be
accident or arcane inscriptions.
South east, beyond the straits, the horizon
is mountains – volcanic, sandstone, slate, shale -
unmoved for hundreds of millions of years.
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Working – with bone, flint, empiricism
in wood, earth, stone -Â death is imminent
and a nonsense. Graffiti are triumph
and denial. This pasture was arable,
oakwood, ice. This hand’s span, which dies with me,
stretches from long, long before the Flood.
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